From personal experience, I know few people who are more self-congratulatory and at the same time vicious than far right Christians. Despite claiming to be followers of Christ, hate, not love, seems to be the sole basis of their professed religious belief. Anyone who doesn't subscribe to their perverted world view is condemned and in the case of LGBT citizens, depicted as less than human, diseased, a threat to society, etc. It's precisely the propaganda approach that the Nazi regime used to justify the Holocaust. And yet our news media refuses to draw this direct comparison and foul individuals like Tony Perkins are repeatedly given a platform on national news outlets. In an address at the University of North Texas, Dan Savage uttered the words that I believe are true: every time a gay teen ends their life, folks like Perkins celebrate. Another "faggot" is gone from the world and the Christianists have tangible proof that their hate campaign is having the desired deadly effect. It's sickening, but then that's what Christianity has become under this monsters who wrap themselves in the cloak of religion. Here are some highlights from the Dallas Voice on Dan's remarks:
I agree with Dan - especially his call for other Christians to stop their complicity in the conservative Christian anti-gay agenda. Silence is deadly and if these other Christians refuse to speak out, then they become part of the problem.
“Every time LGBT bullying kills a kid, Tony Perkins gets up from his desk and dances a jig,” sex-advice-columnist-turned-LGBT youth advocate Dan Savage said of the anti-gay Family Research Council president during Savage’s keynote speech at the 12th Annual University of North Texas Equity and Diversity Conference on Tuesday.
“Every LGBT youth suicide for them is a victory, a rhetorical and moral victory,” Savage added.
When some LGBT teenagers come out to their parents, Savage said, the parents do “what the Christian right tells them to do”— cut them off financially and emotionally, disown them, turn them out into the streets or send them to camps meant to “turn them straight,” often repeating the lies spread by so-called Christian groups like the Family Research Council — which say that LGBT people are child-molesting sexual predators whose mere existence threatens families and the very survival of the planet (a line uttered by the Pope just this last month).
Savage admitted to the crowd made up mostly of students that the It Gets Better project can’t end bullying. “[However, that] does not excuse or preclude us from doing more …” Savage continued, “from confronting bullies, from holding schools and teachers and preachers and parents responsible for what they do or don’t do or fail to do for LGBT kids in pain.”
That’s why Savage’s project has supported Sen. Al Franken’s Student Non-Discrimination Act as well as the efforts of groups like the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, the Trevor Project and the American Civil Liberties Union.
“[The Trevor Project] is there to talk kids off the ledge,” Savage said, “GLSEN is there to make sure there are fewer kids in our schools climbing out onto that ledge and the ACLU is there sue the crap out of schools that push kids onto that ledge.”
Citing studies from the University of Illinois and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Savage said rates of teenage suicide (LGBT and straight) and sexual violence against girls is much higher in schools where anti-LGBT bullying is tolerated — in short, that anti-LGBT bullying makes schools unsafe for everyone. And yet the religious right continues to oppose campaigns against anti-LGBT bullying as “indoctrination.”
Savage asserts that he isn’t hostile to religion, citing his good relationship with his Catholic father and the fact that his last act of love for his mother as she lay dying in an Arizona hospital bed was to find a priest to initiate her last rites.
But instead of letting kids act out the violence of their adult role-models who bash gays at the pulpit and the ballot box, Savage called on school members to actively oppose anti-LGBT bullying and on liberal and more progressive Christians to stop “the complicit silence … aiding them and abetting [the religious right] in their crimes.”
I agree with Dan - especially his call for other Christians to stop their complicity in the conservative Christian anti-gay agenda. Silence is deadly and if these other Christians refuse to speak out, then they become part of the problem.
1 comment:
When you look at the makeup of the United States, you will notice that there are people from all different races and religions here. From a historical standpoint, people fled their respective homelands to pursue religious freedom and freedom from persecution.
On my blog, Opinions From an Average Jorge, I posted a video yeaterday regarding violence against homosexuals as well as bullying. How sad is it that the people who were once persecuted have now become the persecutor? America should now be considered the "land of the free, home of hypocrisy."
From a religious standpoint, people are infinitely more hypocritical when it comes to the issue of homosexuality. But you can watch my videos to see where I am coming from on that one. The point in the end is that we are basically spitting on the face of history since this is precisely what so many have fought to eliminate. We are willfully ignorant for it.
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