What's Wrong With Being Gay?

A column in the San Francisco Chronicle that looks at the Christian Right's jihad against Kevin Jennings, the assistant deputy secretary of education, who heads the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools, raises a good question. Namely, what's wrong with being gay? The answer is nothing at all unless one subscribes to ignorance and bigotry based on few passages from an ancient,often historically inaccurate, much edited and modified writing known as the Bible. Same sex attraction has been documented to exist in virtually hundreds of animal species and increasingly has been shown to be an innate as opposed to learned phenomenon in humans. You either are gay or you are not - it does NOT changes despite the claims of snake oil merchant like preachers, many of whom are out to make a quick buck off of the fears of others. Hence, there is nothing to "promote" despite the claims of the theocrats. Moreover, the fact that religious based ignorance and bigotry is allowed to attempt to influence science and public policy in a nation that claims to guarantee religious freedom to ALL is a travesty - and evidence that much of America's promise to its citizens continues to be a fraud. Here are some highlights:

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Let's suppose, for a moment, that conservative critics are correct: Gay educators want to "promote homosexuality" in American schools. So what? That's the real question behind the recent attacks on Kevin Jennings, the assistant deputy secretary of education, who heads the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools. Fifty-three House Republicans signed a letter Oct. 15 calling on President Obama to fire Jennings, who founded the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN) in 1990. According to its critics, GLSEN spreads "the gay agenda" - that is, it tries to make more people gay.

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By denying the charge that they're promoting homosexuality, gay activists implicitly endorse the idea that there would be something wrong if they were promoting it. . . . But none of this should matter, he quickly added. One day, Jennings said, "most straight people, when they would hear that someone was promoting homosexuality, would say, 'Yeah, who cares?' because they wouldn't necessarily equate homosexuality with something bad that you would not want to promote."

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So the real question isn't whether Jennings and other educators want to promote homosexuality. It's about being gay, and whether there's anything wrong with that. And on that question, Americans remain deeply divided. So I have a proposition: Let's have a full and free airing of the question in America's high schools.

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I believe that increasingly such discussions are happening in the nations' high schools and that in many cases, the students decide that there is nothing wrong with being gay - something that scares the daylights out of the Christianists who subconsciously know that they are losing the "culture wars." Meanwhile, I have to wonder about the mental issues that make Christianist strive to make others live their lives in misery and self-hate merely because we do not subscribe to their intolerant religious beliefs. These folks say that its the gays who are sick, but in reality it is they themselves who are sick spiritually and in some cases mentally (e.g., think Randall Terry and Peter LaBarbera).