Last week’s transgender hearing shows great progress, but much work lies ahead.
Pride should continue into July, when the gay story becomes part of the American story.
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GRAHAM MURPHY
Friday, July 15, 2005
OUR YOUTH ARE under attack. Within the Washington, D.C. area, where some of the largest gay organizations and brightest activists reside, we are losing the battle for LGBT youth.
School districts in the suburbs that surround the District are giving in to the pressures of religious conservatives when it comes to issues like protecting the safety and health of LGBT youth. Unfortunately, our efforts to stop the conservatives seem to be failing.
The success religious conservatives are having at harming LGBT youth is epitomized in their recent victory in Montgomery County, Md.
Montgomery County is not a conservative bastion; 66 percent voted for John Kerry in the 2004 election. But conservative activists were recently able to stop the implementation of a new sex-ed curriculum in the county’s schools that had great potential to reduce risky sexual activity among LGBT youth and that taught students that being gay is normal.
Conservatives used anti-gay rhetoric and classic “judicial activism” to prevent the curriculum’s implementation on religious grounds.
The response from the gay community was tepid and weak. The response from the “ex-gay” community, which spearheaded the movement against the curriculum, was exuberant and triumphant.
WHAT HAPPENED IN Montgomery County is now a successful model of how conservatives plan to exploit LGBT youth for their own political gain throughout the country.
By erasing LGBT-inclusive language from Montgomery County’s sex-ed curriculum, they have proven that they have the power to erase lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender from the American lexicon.
It is the ideological belief of these people that LGBT youth do not exist. To them, abstinence-only-until-marriage sex-ed programs work for all youth, because no youth is inherently gay. To religious conservatives, being gay is a disease that can be cured.
And while well-adjusted LGBT individuals living in a so-called “post-gay” society would like to believe that America is beyond this type of thinking, the LGBT youth in our schools face a different reality.
As an activist for our youth, I have first-hand exposure to the reality they face. I have come across LGBT youth who are manipulated by school administrators they are told to respect, who lead these youth to believe they have no basic rights.
I have come across LGBT youth who have conservative religious parents who want to erase them from the family tree. I have come across LGBT youth who are HIV-positive because their school did not teach them how to protect themselves.
TO THESE YOUTH, the LGBT community is dead or never existed at all. We have not done enough to help these young people, who are in the most desperate of situations.
While LGBT rights groups are working to ensure the overall welfare of our youth, they can only do as much as funding and resources allow. Unfortunately, I can say as an individual quite involved in such organizations that we’re not doing enough to open up our wallets to fund youth issues.
Instead, we seem determined to build a post-gay society focused on issues like same-sex marriage.
Unless we begin to do something now, things are only going to get worse for our youth.
The Southern Baptist Convention just passed a resolution encouraging parents to investigate whether or not the public schools in their community are “presenting homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle.” A culture is growing to indoctrinate all youth to believe LGBT people are afflicted with a terrible and curable disease.
This is not meant as a guilt trip but a reality check. This is meant to make us all accountable for the protection of the most innocent and vulnerable members of the LGBT family.
We are all family, and right now we are failing our children. Open up your wallets, your hearts and spend some time helping to raise our kids better in a more loving world.
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