What’s going on with the most hateful woman in the United States of America? Well, she’s rolled out ten reasons why parents should keep their kids home truant during the “Day of Silence,” which is intended to educate students about the issues facing LGBT kids, including but not limited to the bullying and suicide problem. But, you see, the Religious Right wants to protect only the kids who are willing to adopt their malignant, disproven worldview wholesale, and that decidedly doesn’t include gay kids, as they are expendable to people like Linda Harvey.
Let’s look at her ten reasons why it’s okay to teach your kids to be bigots on the Day of Silence by keeping them home, but first, here’s a bit of her intro:
The Day of Silence goal is not, as I am told frequently by outraged emails from misinformed students, to help end all bullying. The goal is to exploit the tender sympathies of kids to promote homosexuality and gender confusion. The agenda is everything; Judeo-Christian morality is the enemy; and sadly, kids are the tools.
Hm. What’s more likely? That an unhinged bigot who just got added to the SPLC’s list of hate groups is right, or that kids who actually grew up knowing gay kids are right? Of course, we’ll quickly note the incorrect use of the term “Judeo-Christian,” which conservative Christian hate group leaders use in order to pretend to themselves and others that their movement is not limited to the most backwards of fundamentalist Christians.
GLSEN teaches students that homosexuals and gender-confused people are “silenced” and under persecution by those who object to this behavior, and that traditional moral concerns cause bullying.
Because they do. Any gay kid who grew up in the hell of the fundamentalist Christian world can attest to this. Their concerns are, of course, not important to people like Linda, because again, anyone who doesn’t toe the patriarchal fundamentalist line on these issues is expendable to them.
No hard, objective data exist to support this contention
No hard, objective data that Linda is willing to read, anyway. Lots of studies have been done which support our contentions, but blinders are blinders, and Linda’s are permanently affixed to her eyes.
Okay, on to Linda’s “reasons.” I will rebut each with one simple sentence, as this kind of drivel merits nothing more:
1. A silent protest in support of immoral, God-dishonoring behavior is in itself profoundly deceptive. All sexual behavior outside man/woman marriage is sinful in God’s eyes. Why should Christian students and teachers be in the position of accommodating this flagrant violation of their principles?
Public schools exist to educate children, and are not beholden to the backwards, disproven, toxic beliefs of Fundamentalists.
2. Any explicit or implicit message encouraging teens and even younger students to experiment freely with homosexual behavior is not “social justice” or “tolerance,” but actually, child corruption.
No one is “encouraging” anyone to “experiment freely” with anything, but rather they are trying to create an environment unacceptable to Linda, one where gay kids don’t hate themselves with every fiber of their beings.
3. Allowing classroom silence to honor the Day of Silence unleashes tremendous peer pressure for students and even teachers to endorse sexual immorality, or be considered “enemies” of those peers and teachers proudly involved in homosexuality. This puts people of faith in the position of violating Christian doctrine through tacit approval (Romans 16:17-18; Ephesians 5:11). They are also intimidated into self-censoring their First Amendment rights.
No one’s being intimidated into anything and no one’s rights are being threatened, but if it encourages just one bigot to keep her mouth shut in order to create a safer environment for her students, so be it.
4. The Day of Silence encourages students to nurture prejudiced, hostile and bigoted attitudes against Christians and others with traditional moral beliefs, and to spread inaccurate and harmful information.
Linda, you do not have a corner on the word “Christian,” and in fact your beliefs put you squarely somewhere out in space compared to the vast majority of Christians in this country.
5. Using legitimate concerns about bullying and teen suicide to advance the promotion of homosexuality in schools is educational malpractice. It’s totally unnecessary to stop bullying and prevent harm to students, and Christians should not be a party to this gross distortion of a genuine problem. No one needs to embrace homosexuality or gender confusion in order to prevent bullying, but GLSEN routinely takes this deceitful position.
Anti-gay bullies wouldn’t bully gay kids into depression and, worse, suicide, if they didn’t first hear that it was okay to hate and abuse gay kids from fundamentalist religious people, as that sort of unhinged bigotry and fear is a learned behavior.
6. Teachers know harassment when they see it. They can simply say, “Cut it out!” But GLSEN and the Day of Silence pressure teachers to amend this to, “Cut it out, because you are only permitted to say good things about homosexuality!” When did we all sign up to become public-relations agents for the good reputation of homosexuality? This viewpoint discrimination forces an untruthful and ungodly agenda on staff members, when stopping verbal harassment can be accomplished without becoming champions of “gay” behavior.
“Cut it out!,” said the teacher who walked in on the straight “Christian” jock beating the shit out of the gay kid in the hallway, failing to prevent the action from happening in the first place and failing to address why it’s not okay to beat the shit out of kids for being gay…
7. There are legitimate lessons students should learn about prejudice and bias. But Day of Silence promoters deceptively link moral objections about homosexuality to racial discrimination or anti-Semitism in an attempt to legitimize the pro-homosexual agenda and portray homosexuals as perennial victims, while disguising the harmfulness and risk.
The reasoning behind racism and anti-semitism is linked to the reasoning behind anti-gay bigotry because they all share a few things in common: none of them make any sense, none of them are rooted in sort of discernible reality, yet the purveyors of all three kinds of hatred wouldn’t believe or act the way they do if the “adults” in their lives didn’t first model said behavior.
8. Teachers have used the DOS to inappropriately become classroom advocates and models of this deviant behavior. In one Ohio school, a teacher used a PowerPoint presentation to tell students about her “gay” support and even disclosed to students that she was a lesbian, without prior notice to parents or permission from her principal.
It’s okay for a teacher, who isn’t beholden to fundamentalist Christianity in either her life and DEFINITELY not in her job, to refrain from abusing children with indoctrination into right-wing Christian bigotry, and it’s also okay for a teacher to let her students know that she has a wife, as children in public school are being educated into the realities of the world, rather than the pretend reality of Linda Harvey.
9. The health and lifestyle risks of homosexuality are virtually never shared on the Day of Silence. Instead, students are given the deceitful impression that homosexuality is just as safe and worthy an identity as heterosexual dating and marriage.
Generally, it’s better to teach kids reality, rather than the a-scientific ramblings of disgraced “researchers” like Paul Cameron.
10. The DOS message inhibits Christians from witnessing to their peers caught up in homosexuality or gender confusion. There is salvation through Jesus Christ and the hope of leaving this sin behind. Calling homosexuality a sin on the Day of Silence would be considered “hateful,” when it is actually God-honoring and respectful to the hearer. It may lead them to an eternal home with God. But that won’t happen if the truth is suppressed, which it always is on the Day of Silence. Stay home that day, and choose to witness on another, where perhaps you will have a fair chance of being heard.
You call it “witnessing,” people who actually care about children and the gay kids themselves call it bullying.
And done! A one-sentence rebuttal for each, and now I go have dinner.
