Christian Pastor Walter Hoye Warns of the Wages of the Sexual Revolution

The pro-life activist received the Ruth Institute’s ‘Witness of the Year’ Award at the apostolate’s recent conference.

Pro-life activist Walter Hoye
Pro-life activist Walter Hoye (photo: Courtesy image/Issues4Life)

“The sexual revolution has completely destroyed the black family.” That’s the sober message from Rev. Walter Hoye, founder of the Issues4Life Foundation and the California Civil Rights Coalition, and co-founder of the National Black Pro-life Coalition. Hoye was the recipient of the “Witness of the Year” Award at the Ruth Institute’s 2021 Survivors’ Summit. 

Ordained in the Baptist church, Hoye left the ministry in 2010 to pursue full-time pro-life work. His strong pro-life witness had attracted the attention of Americans the year before, when he was sentenced to 30 days in jail in Oakland, California. His supposed “crime” was praying on public property outside of an abortion business while holding aloft a sign that read: 

“Jesus loves you and your baby. Let us help you.” 

Hoye’s prison sentence could have been reduced to probation and he could have been released, had he agreed to stay at least 100 yards away from the abortion facility where he had been arrested; but he refused to comply, standing firm in his defense of the unborn. 

The Register talked with Rev. Hoye about his ongoing pro-life efforts, the effect of the sexual revolution on the black community, and about the Survivors’ Summit, which took place July 16-17 in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Hoye described the Survivors’ Summit, which focused on how people in the medical, legal and therapeutic professions could resist the progressive push by the culture, as “a transcendent, fundamental experience in accord with the all-powerful reality of truth.” 

He recalled in particular the moving presentation by Walt Heyer, who underwent radical surgery and lived for eight years as a transgender woman before detransitioning in 1991. “He described the actual physical damage he has suffered as a result,” Rev. Hoye said. “Not a video, not a brochure ... but an actual person. The same with the other presenters who were there. Jennifer Morse brought in the witnesses who proved the point.”

 

The Sexual Revolution: An Ongoing Threat for Black America

Speaking about the African-American community, Hoye was not optimistic regarding the future for Black Americans — largely because of the deleterious effects of the sexual revolution. 

“Margaret Sanger is probably smiling in her grave,” he said. “Abortion exists because of Black America.” 

In its earlier days, Planned Parenthood was less taciturn about their population control goal than they are today. As evidence of the abortion giant’s early transparency, Hoye had in his file Planned Parenthood pamphlets dating to 1964 and 1969 that acknowledge that abortion takes the life of an innocent human being. In 1967, he said, it became legal to end the lives of the unborn in the states of California, Colorado and Mississippi. Just six years after that, Roe v. Wade became the law of the land, legalizing abortion in all 50 states.

While Hoye has devoted much of his career to fighting abortion, he was equally concerned about the state of marriage in the Black community. “If you go back to the early 1960s,” Hoye remarked, “families were about 70% to 80% intact — that is, with Mom, Dad and children. Back then, everyone did what they were supposed to do. A man was expected to marry a woman, put a ring on her finger, get a job, raise his children, build a family.”

“But a lot of things happened between then and now,” he said. “We no longer believe that if I do what the Bible tells me to do, then God will bless me and I will be successful.” 

Hoye cited two trends which have devastated the Black community: the decrease in marriage and stable families, with the corresponding decline in fertility; and the surge in abortions. “People come to California,” he said, “because of the welfare benefits. If you’re a single woman, you get more money if you don’t marry.” 

 

A Plummeting Fertility Rate

In the last century, Hoye reported, the fertility rate among Black Americans dropped 78% – from 7.9 births per woman in the 1850s, to 3.6 in 1950; and then, after the passage of Roe v. Wade, the total fertility rate for Black women fell to 2.3 births per woman. The decline in births continues at a remarkable rate: By 2018, according to the National Vital Statistics Report, a steady decline brought the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) for Black Americans down to 1.792. 

If one follows the trajectory, Hoye explained, by 2036 the Black American population’s Total Fertility Rate (TFR) will have fallen below 1.3. According to the Population Reference Bureau, long periods of low fertility rates have an irreversible consequence; and at that point, Rev. Hoye warned, Black America will be facing “irreversibility.” There will be too few children in the succeeding generations to keep society moving forward – too few workers, too few consumers, too few caretakers.

“There is such a thing as ‘Too Late,’” Rev. Hoye said. “History has written ‘Too Late’ on the tombstone of many.” 


The full story of Rev. Walter Hoye’s imprisonment is told in Black and Pro-Life in America: The Incarceration and Exoneration of Walter B. Hoye II (Ignatius Press, 2018). More information about the 2021 Survivors’ Summit is available at the Ruth Institute website.