Lively and Abrams thesis collapses into absurdity when one considers the vigor of Mann’s opposition to Hitler’s fascism. People of all orientations and worldviews supported and opposed Hitler. The Nazis used anyone, gay or straight, religious or not, to get to power. And once they attained power, they systematically crushed opposition both gay and straight, religious and not.

To close this post, read the closing argument offered by Mann to the German people in his July, 1942 broadcast. Note his utter contempt for the intellectual foundations of Nazism. And then recall that the speaker was attracted to the same sex.

The end is near, Germans, believe me, and be of good cheer! Just at this moment I tell it to you when once again it looks like success and victory and conquest for you. The end is near – not yours, not Germany’s. The so-called destruction of Germany is as empty a word, as non-existent a thing, as the victory of Hitler. But the end is approaching; in fact, it will come soon – the end of the repulsive system, the robber, murder, and liar state of National Socialism. An end will be put to its trashy and disgraceful philosophy and all the acts of trash and disgrace which have sprung from it. Accounts will be settled, disastrously settled, with its bigwigs, its leaders and helpers, servants and beneficiaries, its generals, diplomats, and Gestapo hyenas. Accounts will also be settled with its intellectual trail-blazers and shield-bearers, the journalists and pseudo-philosophers who licked its boots, the geopoliticians, war geographers, teachers of “Wehrwissenschaft” and race professors. Germany will be cleansed of all that ever had anything to do with the filth of Hitlerism and all that made it possible. And a freedom will be established in Germany and in the world which believes in itself, respects itself, knows how to defend itself, and which takes not only the deed but, before that, the thoughts into the control of those ideas which connect man with God.

Those inclined to accept the thesis in The Pink Swastika might complain that one bisexual opponent to Hitler is not disruptive to Lively’s proposed link between fascism and homosexuality. However, I submit that Mann’s experience is one relevant resbuttal to the idea that the experience of same-sex attraction necessarily leads to fascist beliefs and tactics. Throughout The Pink Swastika, Lively and Abrams play fast and loose with the historical record in order to find links between homosexuality and fascism.

Evangelical Christians as a group do not endorse any sexuality outside of heterosexual marriage. However, I believe it is a significant error to appeal to Christian teaching as a basis for shrill rhetoric and implausibly simplistic theories about homosexuality and evil in history. In fact, the effort of The Pink Swastika to link fascism and other historical evils primarily to the homosexual impulse could easily distract from the inherent chaos of our shared human nature. Reducing the Nazi atrocities to one strain of human experience could lead to the mistaken idea that non-homosexuals are in some way less prone to the path of evil. In fact, one of the great puzzles and tragedies of Nazi Germany was how so many good people, straight Christians among them, could participate in such great evil. We must not lose the awareness that humans are deeply susceptible to inhuman responses. We cannot allow a kind of 'straight pride' to numb us to the reality that the human heart is 'desperately wicked', in the words of Jeremiah, and in need of redemption.