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Baron Wilhelm Von Steuben, a gay man who was one of the indispensable heroes of the American Revolution.

Sex: A broad subject from asexuals 
to fanatical sexy zealots
Although there have been about 450 different versions of the Bible, the whole Bible translated to 726 languages, and the New Testament translated to 1,726 languages, evidently the only thing Jesus Christ has to say about sex is: “Don’t commit adultery –but please love your neighbor.”  

Not a word about homosexuality, celibacy or cavorting with the Mary Magdalenes of the world. 
Pope Alexander VI had 10 children, some horny popes had children out of wedlock, 39 popes were married, and some led rather scandalous sexual lives. One was said to have had an adulterous affair with a daughter! 

Oh, well, Timothy Egan in his New York Times article “The Catholic Church is Sick with Sex” covers a little history of the church.

Sex is still a dominating subject in the 21st century because it sells cars and rock & roll music concerts and we have a president who by the record of lawsuits has been a sexual predator at least 27 times. He also was re-elected by assaulting the LBGTQUIA+ community constantly – particularly by keeping transgender persons in the 24/7 news cycle.

In July, 2020, John Casey of the Advocate wrote “Mary L. Trump on Growing Up Gay in an ‘Anti-Everything’ Family.”  Donald Trump’s niece had written her book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. 

Casey quoted Mary: “Even though homophobia wasn’t really explicit in my family, growing up, no one talked about homosexuality one way or another. My family was so anti-everything, anything that was different from them. So, I just assumed they were anti-gay, and that was something they would not tolerate. My friends have been my family throughout my life. My grandmother said: ‘It was a disgrace they’re letting that little faggot Elton John sing at Princess Diana’s funeral service.’ It made me feel awful, mainly because I loved Elton John. Everyone in the family was misogynist. My grandfather believed in the power of positive thinking to such a degree it wasn’t positive at all. There was no room for mistakes. There was no suffering, or pain, or any emotion. It was severely damaging, but emotionally and psychologically. It’s destructive.” 

Mary Trump has a PHD in psychology and practices it, so has figured out why her Uncle Donald is a dangerous man who is mentally unbalanced, and for decades has been a jerk, prick, asshole, malignant narcissist and a socio-psychopath. He is dangerous in leading any organization, let alone a country.

The first important lesson about sex: What’s intersex?
If you believe in one of the 450 versions of the Bible, you must also believe that God checks out everyone in the womb. The problem is He doesn’t diagnose and treat any deviation from the perfect Adam and Eve.  

It may be shocking that intersex people are born with some biological characteristics that are considered “female” and others that are considered “male.” Estimates say about one in 100 people born in the Divided States of America is intersex. This means that about 36,000 persons are born in this country with a variety of conditions in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t fit the typical definitions of female or male. 

Sometimes an intersex person is assigned a female or male sex at birth through surgery if external genitals are not obviously male or female. Intersex babies are always assigned a legal sex, but sometimes when they grow up, their gender doesn’t match the sex selected for them. 

There are many variations. Some intersex people have ambiguous genitalia or internal sex organs, such as a person with both ovarian and testicular tissues. Others have a combination of chromosomes that is different than XY (male) and XX (female), like XXY. Some people are born with what looks like totally male or totally female genitals, but their internal organs or hormones released during puberty don’t match. 

Consequently, a person can live their whole life without discovering that they’re intersex. Now I’m going to tell you the story of South African Caster Semenya, female distance runner.

I always watch the Olympic track events. In the 2012 Olympics 800-meter race I watched a black girl proportioned like a man blow away the competition. She was legally identified as a female by some authorities, but according to others, she had some “differences of sex development” because her body naturally produced higher levels of testosterone than most women. 

Yes, women produce testosterone. 

She was challenged by governing bodies of track and field, and her battle was on. Then she won the 2016 Olympics gold medal in the 800. Caster was forced to take medications lowering her testosterone, but she ended up with sickening side effects. She said: “I don’t want to be used as a human guinea pig,” so she took them to Swiss federal court. 

Despite all of the battles over her gender, she dominated her sport between 2009 and 2019. She supported herself by winning world titles. In 2023, Human Rights Watch said the rules she was forced to live with were “degrading and invasive of privacy on grounds that are scientifically contested.” 
Finally, on July 10, 2025, the European Court of Human Rights declared she had not been given a fair trial in her many battles to continue in her sport. Now, at age 34, she welcomed the decision by saying “great for me, great for athletes. We need to respect athletes. We need to put their rights first.” 

There are many lessons to be learned in welcoming members of the LBGTQUIA+ community to a society. After all, they make up 34.7 million of the total population and are our neighbors. 

Martin Van Klompenberg of Moorhead said it all in just three sentences in a letter to The Forum: “Sports exist in schools to teach students communication and teamwork skills that can endure them for life. Bigotry and hatred that keeps children from competing should be unwelcome at this time. Sports are for everyone!!”

A gay general was the “most valuable” soldier in the Revolutionary War       
In preparing the Continental Army to take on the British Empire, George Washington took the advice of Ben Franklin and appointed Prussian Baron Wilhelm Von Steuben his second in command. 
Von Steuben, an expert in organizing for war in Europe, was about to be thrown out of the Prussian forces for religious reasons: he was a homosexual long before the Prussian military had a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. 

General Washington quickly appointed him major general and his second in command. Accepting the promotion and command position, Von Steuben and his male partner made the voyage to America. He quickly formed the “ragtag” militias of each of the 13 colonies into a rather formidable force. He also assumed the job of the army’s first inspector general and wrote the drill books that would be used by the Continental Army for the next 35 years. 

You have one guess for who designed our first military academy now called West Point. 

The very conservative Barry Goldwater, one of our presidential candidates who always preached the “strong national defense” routine, just happened to have a grandson who was gay. Barry, almost alone among Republicans, supported the LBGTQUIA+ community by often repeating his famous line: “You don’t have to be straight to shoot straight.” 

We already know that our current president with the five deferments, sore bone spurs, and a total lack of knowledge about American and world history and military relationships, does not want females, gays and transgender persons in our military forces. He and his Secretary of Defense should study the lives of a few gay people in history who played significant roles in wars: Alexander the Great, Lawrence of Arabia, Richard-the Lion-Hearted, Walt Whitman, Alan Turing, Achillies, Peter the Great, J, Edgar Hoover and Julius Caesar, who drafted gays into the Roman Army. 

And was St. Joan of Arc a transgender leader of the French Army? Joan chose to dress as a male.

Much of the world is trying to open doors to the LBGTQUIA+ community
While we are trying to close them. The World Health Organization no longer classifies being transgender as a “mental disorder.”  

The United Nations Human Rights Council in June voted to extend the term of its experts who investigate human rights abuses against gay people. The International Lesbian, Gay, Binary, Transgender and Intersex World Executive Director Julia Ehrt approved of the renewal: “The renewal of this mandate is a spark of hope in a time when reactionary powers worldwide are trying to dismantle programs that our communities fought so hard to achieve.”  

This is an obvious remark about the fact that the Trump administration has withdrawn from both organizations, and Trump has issued several anti-LBGTQUIA+ community executive orders in the six months he’s been in office in an attempt to keep the support of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians and conservative Roman Catholics who say homosexuals are “intrinsically disordered.” 

In that Jesus Christ said: “love thy neighbor” and never said “hate gays,” who started those rumors about gays? 

Let’s look at numbers for a moment. According to gender experts in the 21st century the Divided States of America has about 37 million people in the LBGTQUIA+ community with 74 identifiable genders at the moment. 

This is the percentage composition of the community of 10% of the total population: Lesbians-1.4%, Bisexuals-5.2%, Transgenders-1.3%, Gay-2%, and at least 70 other genders such as asexuals, pansexuals, and others too numerous to mention at a total of 1%.

Many states and countries have closed doors to the gay community, and a few have tried to lock and chain it. As an example, Idaho Attorney General Raul Labrador has issued an opinion telling all schools that teachers cannot post signs that can be interpreted to say: “Everyone is Welcome Here.” 
Good God! A family with gay members could begin to think they are welcome in this state! 

A teacher at Lewis and Clark Middle School in West Ada School District had put up a welcome sign of human hands of different colors with each one having a small heart on a hand. Well, guess who wasn’t welcome at this Idaho school. 

According to the new House Law 41, school employees cannot display flags, banners, posters or pictures that might show opinions, emotions, beliefs or thoughts about politics, faith or religion. There is no doubt that the Trumplican Party in Idaho has only one major interest: MAWF! That is: Make America White Forever!

When Charles Darwin wrote his revolutionary and evolutionary book Origin of the Species, he often ended his arguments with a “bow to our extreme ignorance.” In his last chapter he concludes by writing “serious objections to my theories remain, but they refer to questions on which we are confessedly ignorant, nor do we know how ignorant we are.” 

From a new atheist: “Let us pray that most people are no longer prey to the ignorant.”