Focus on the Family blasts the Day of Silence — GLSEN’s annual antiviolence vigil and conversation-starter in schools — as a sinister manifestation of the “homosexual agenda.”
Focus is alarmed that the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network encourages schools to acknowledge the existence of LGBT youth — such acknowledgment being an obvious prerequisite to stopping violence against those youth.
Instead of acknowledging that gender- and orientation-variant youth exist and should not be assaulted and intimidated with impunity, Focus claims that the ex-gay activist group Exodus International offers “redemptive truth” as an alternative to nonviolence.
Exodus’ Day of Truth, purposely scheduled one day prior to the Day of Silence, condemns LGBT youth to hell and urges “Christian” youths to view their LGBT-tolerant classmates as inferior prior to any “conversation” about violence that the Day of Silence might otherwise prompt.
Violence does not concern Focus; “lesbian, gay and bisexual materials in the classroom” do.
Focus and Exodus are purposely ignorant of the New Testament’s repeated admonitions against violence toward ethnic and gender minorities; and where Focus and Exodus claim to be knowledgeable, the knowledge is false. “The biblical truth for sexuality” — as interpreted by their mentor James Dobson — isn’t Biblical at all. It is a 1950s TV sitcom fantasy of heterosexual marriage at age 18 followed by premature child-raising and lives of suffocating gender-role conformity. This myth of white suburban Americana rejects the Bible’s conflicting affirmations of celibate evangelism, polygamy, rape, and same-sex relationships; ignores the ethnicity and modest living standards of Biblical characters; and applauds the Bible’s ignorance of crucial scientific and historical facts.
Do Focus or Exodus offer Biblical truth? No. Redemption? No. Freedom from violence? Absolutely not. What they do offer is little more than a cocoon of smug self-satisfaction, ethnic and sexual ignorance, and the sort of hypocritical moralizing and intimidation that Jesus of Nazareth reputedly condemned.
