Baron Omar Rolf von Ehrenfels
Baron Omar Rolf von Ehrenfels (born 28 April 1901 in Prague - died 7 February 1980 in Neckargemünd, Heidelberg, Germany) was a prominent Muslim of Austrian origin.
Christian von Ehrenfels
Dickinson noted Ehrenfels's vision of humanity was a simplistic one, in which men fought and struggled to pass on their genes by impregnating as many women as possible. The existence of homosexuality and bi-sexuality posed a major problem for Ehrenfels's view of humanity. In 1897, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the first gay rights group in not only Germany, but also the world was founded. One of the founders of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, Magnus Hirschfeld, the German sexologist and gay rights advocate, was a well known figure in the German-speaking world in the early 20th century and his theories were much debated. In 1899, Hirschfeld had argued in an essay: "that in all mental and physical characteristics there are only gradual, quantitative differences between men and women, that between them, in every respect, there are all sorts of mixed forms in extraordinary diversity". Hirschfeld's theories about varieties of human sexuality ranging from heterosexual to bisexual to homosexual and all of which were equally valid, posed a major for Ehrenfels. Ehrenfels simply dismissed everything Hirschfeld had to say out of hand, saying that homosexuality was a case of moral degeneration caused by a few "biologically degenerate homosexuals" who seduced otherwise "healthy boys" into their lifestyle. Ehrenfels could not accept Hirschfeld's theory that some people were born gay as it contradicted his view of male sexuality as an aggressive drive to pass on one's genes too much.