President Lincoln was not “gay,” and the growing media and academic speculation over this preposterous allegation is evidence of the corruption caused by the cultural elite’s embrace of homosexuality.

Once a wild accusation advanced by a radical homosexual professor writing in a vulgar book published by the “Gay Sunshine Press,” the idea that America’s Civil War president was homosexual or bisexual is now receiving mainstream media attention. The release of “The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln,” by now-deceased homosexual psychologist and sex researcher C.A. Tripp, has fueled discussion of Lincoln’s alleged “gayness”-even in the conservative National Review.

Tripp posits that Lincoln and his close friend and bunkmate Joshua Speed were homosexual lovers-a conclusion rejected by respected Lincoln scholars and one that selectively applies evidence and current, decadent sexual mores to a vastly different era (e.g., there was a shortage of beds, so men often bunked together). Lincoln scholar Michael Burlingame writes of Tripp’s thesis: “insofar as it leads people to think that Lincoln was gay, it does a disservice to history, for the evidence Dr. Tripp adduced fails to support the case.”

Other respected Lincoln scholars, including David Herbert Donald, concur with Burlingame, criticizing Tripp for sexualizing expressions of endearment between friends Lincoln and Speed. (Tripp cites Lincoln’s use of “yours forever” in letters to Speed-words, it turns out, Lincoln used in correspondence with other men and leaders.)

Like the thief who thinks everybody steals, America’s homosexual movement-using the twisted ‘scholarship’ of Dr. Tripp-is convinced that Abe Lincoln’s warm friendships with other men must have been sexual. The tragedy is that Lincoln, who revered the Bible, cannot defend himself from the grave, and that even debating this ridiculous charge popularizes it.

Are schoolchildren now going to be taught that ‘Abe Lincoln may have had a gay orientation,’ just as 7th graders across the nation are now debating homosexual ‘marriage’? Here in the Land of Lincoln, we would ask that the media and academy show a bit more respect to the 16th President than the homosexual movement which, apparently, will stop at nothing to advance its cause.

IFI is a non-profit, non-partisan group that defends marriage, family and life in Illinois.