Michael Brown is a talk show host and speaker who pushes the conspiratorial idea that LGBTQ+ activists are enacting an agenda to “normalize homosexuality,” “redefine marriage” and “groom” children. Brown also generally argues that LGBTQ+ rights come at the expense of Christian freedoms.
About Michael Brown
Michael Brown peddles the idea that a cabal of liberal media elites have orchestrated a “homosexual agenda” to indoctrinate children into a “gay lifestyle.” Brown also claims that society is “normaliz[ing] homosexuality” and that coming out of the closet is a “selfish act.” Brown has also argued that “if gay is good, Christianity is bad,” and called for others to join him to “outlast the gay revolution.”
Brown often prefaces his anti-LGBTQ+ comments with caveats that he knows and even empathizes with LGBTQ+ people — which, he argues, means he cannot be homophobic. Consistent with this framework, in his 2015 book, Outlasting the Gay Revolution: Where Homosexual Activism Is Really Going and How To Turn the Tide, Brown claims that “it’s the agenda, not the people” he opposes; he then pushes the conspiratorial claim of a “gay agenda” that wants to “strip away the rights of those who oppose them” and “put those who oppose their rights into the closet.”
In the text, he repeats debunked and anti-trans claims about LGBTQ+ civil rights. In one section, he repeats the false claim that the 2015 Houston Equal Rights Ordinance — which, before its repeal, prohibited discrimination against LGBTQ+ people in Houston, Texas — “opened the door to potential heterosexual predators who would use the ordinance as a guise for their perversion.” He also claims in the text that teachers are “encouraging” students to “experiment with homosexual practice to determine if they were gay.”
The founder of the FIRE School of Ministry in Concord, North Carolina, and host of the daily, nationally syndicated talk-radio show and podcast “Line of Fire,” Brown frequently discusses his conversion to Christianity “as a 16-year-old, heroin-shooting, LSD-using Jewish rock drummer.” With a doctorate in Near Eastern languages and literature, he considers himself the world’s “foremost Messianic Jewish apologist” and has taught, he says, at seven theological seminaries.
Brown has ventured beyond seminary walls to take on activist anti-LGBTQ+ projects, selling himself as an expert speaker on the issue of “cultural revolution.” He has appeared on television and radio talk shows and in 2012 delivered a keynote presentation at the annual conference for the organization formerly known as the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), the once preeminent source of junk science aimed at “curing” gay people.
“Speak now,” he says frequently when discussing homosexuality, “or forever hold your peace.”
Brown argued in A Queer Thing Happened to America: And What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been, a 691-page polemic against homosexuality he self-published in 2011:
“When it comes to denying the existence of a gay agenda, there is ‘immense unity’ in the gay community. Why? It is because the denial of that agenda is part of the agenda. … That is the necessary piece of the puzzle.
“It is not good that homosexual behavior is presented as just another alternative to heterosexual behavior, that bisexuality is celebrated, that transgenderism [sic] is normalized, that sex-change surgery is presented as the thing to do, that ex-gays are ridiculed and their very existence denied,” Brown wrote.
Since 2015, in Brown’s published articles and books, he has argued that drag queens reading to children in libraries is “a sign that God has given America over to depravity” and equated it to “grooming,” telling parents, “Your kids are being targeted.”
Brown has also been known to make spurious claims linking homosexuality and pedophilia, and he defended a notorious Uganda law criminalizing homosexuality. In a 2011 essay, he suggested that Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State assistant football coach who sexually abused children, was a gay man. “Could it be,” Brown asked, “that the [Penn State] sex abuse scandal involved a man allegedly abusing boys, meaning that the acts were homosexual in nature?”
The American Psychological Association, contrary to Brown’s insinuations, has officially concluded, “Homosexual men are not more likely to sexually abuse children than heterosexual men.”
In 2016, Brown used the tragic murder of 49 people at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, as an opportunity to extol his own victimization, claiming, “I get death threats and death wishes on a regular basis from the LGBT community.” At the same time, Brown used the deadliest mass shooting in American history targeting the LGBTQ+ community to that date to attack American Muslims, arguing Americans “who are not so forthcoming” with assistance eliminating “Islamic terrorism” will “thereby mark themselves for further scrutiny.”