Monday, May 29, 2006

Time to fight the ex-gay madness

To me, this photo of Alan Chambers, President of leading ex-gay group Exodus International, and his wife, which accompanied yesterday's Los Angeles Times story on the new push for "equal time" for ex-gay viewpoints in schools, says it all:



This is the desire for normalcy at its worst. And this is the face of a movement that truly threatens to turn back gains made in schools over the years. This bullshit needs to be taken on in every school board across America. These programs are so psychologically unsound and so unsafe that they cannot possibly be considered healthy.

It's high time a new push was made to get queer issues addressed in middle and high schools across the nation. Where they're not addressed, we need to work hard to get them included in health/safe-sex curricula as well as highlight, as California may soon do, the contributions of gays and lesbians in history (expect this to be the subject of another post). Where queer issues are addressed, we need to pre-emptively defend them against ex-gay challenges. The 3,000 Gay-Straight Alliances around the country seem perfectly positioned to lead this fight. We have to recognize that it's not enough just to have a support group in a school, and that it's not enough to have a day of SILENCE once a year. The Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN) should organize students in GSAs to start organizing parents and each other, and become true forces for change in their communities.

We should not be timid or afraid of appearing to push too strongly a "gay agenda" - for unless we do, the ex-gay agenda will destroy much of the already incredible progress we've made in schools, which would be a disaster for the LGBT movement.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home