The religious conservative right in this country never ceases to provide me with entertaining and terrifying things to write about. Today’s topic: the No Name-Calling Week.
From CNN’s article:
The initiative was developed by the New York-based Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network, which seeks to ensure that schools safely accommodate students of all sexual orientations. GLSEN worked with James Howe, the openly gay author of “The Misfits” and many other popular children’s books.
“Gay students aren’t the only kids targeted — this isn’t about special rights for them,” Howe said. “But the fact is that ‘faggot’ is probably the most common insult at schools.”
“The Misfits” deals with four much-taunted middle schoolers — one of them gay — who run for the student council on a platform advocating an end to nasty name-calling.
That seems reasonable, right? That’s because it is reasonable. It’s perfectly reasonable to want the children in America to learn tolerance and respect for other human beings. Respect and tolerance have been the goals of many a fine movement. So who’s trying to stop this?
“I hope schools will realize it’s less an exercise in tolerance than a platform for liberal groups to promote their pan-sexual agenda,” said Robert Knight, director of Concerned Women for America’s Culture and Family Institute.
“Schools should be steering kids away from identifying as gay,” Knight said. “You can teach civility to kids and tell them every child is valued without conveying the message that failure to accept homosexuality as normal is a sign of bigotry.”
While it was started by GLSEN, it’s also been backed by many, many groups that have no special place reserved for homosexuality, or a ‘pan-sexual agenda.’ For instance, the Girl Scouts, which as far as I can tell was not designed to be a training ground for lesbianism.
Actually, let’s look at just a few of the supporters of the No Name-Calling Week:
- American Arab Anti-Discrimination Gay Committee
- Council for Children with Behavioral Gay Disorders
- National Urban League Gay
- Girl Scouts of the Gay U.S.A.
- National Association of Gay School Nurses
- Asian Pacific Islanders For Human Rights (gay-sounding)
- Simon & Schuster Children’s Gay Publishing
- National Association of Secondary Gay School Principals
- Big Brothers Big Sisters of Homo America
- Anti-Defamation League (of Gay)
- National Association for Gifted Children (nerds, close to gay)
Holy Shit! Maybe they’re right! These groups are obviously promoting a terrifying pan-sexual agenda! Probably even metrosexual! Oh, wait, my point of view accidentally shifted to being religious and conservative for a moment. I apologize.
One of GLSEN’s most persistent critics is Warren Throckmorton, director of counseling at Grove City College, a Christian school outside Pittsburgh. His skeptical comments about “No Name-Calling Week” have been widely circulated this month on conservative Web sites.
“There’s no question middle school can be a difficult place — I’m not advocating that any group gets mistreated,” Throckmorton said in a telephone interview.
“But it will definitely make traditionally oriented teachers and parents and kids feel very uncomfortable, if they happen to object to homosexuality on moral grounds,” he said of GLSEN’s program. “If you disagree, you’re hateful, you’re bigoted, you’re a homophobe. They’re using name-calling to combat name-calling.”
I hate to be a bringer of bad news, but Throckmorton is right. If you disagree with the idea of tolerance, whether it be for sexual preference or not, it does make you hateful, bigoted, and/or homophobic. Morals are a tricky area, but I don’t think anti-homosexuality can be reasonably argued against with only morals. Religious values, yes; morals and ethics, no. Morals and religious values are not the same thing, and I’d like to see that maxim written on a plaque in front of every courthouse in Georgia.
Lastly, they are not using name-calling to combat name-calling. They’re allowing for tolerance for all beliefs, even as biased and bigoted as Throckmorton’s apparently are, and promoting tolerance by asking kids to think twice before swinging the verbal bats at each other. It’s No Name-Calling Week, not No Discussion-of-Lifestyle Week; it’s hoping to prevent verbal abuse. If your beliefs require you to verbally abuse another human being, or to bully someone whose lifestyle you object to, perhaps you should rethink some things.
At the moment, part of the objections seem to come from an attitude that conservative/ religious/ homophobes cannot support anything that tolerance and gay-rights organizations also support. This isn’t a gay issue, it’s a tolerance issue that happened to have been opened up by a gay rights group; perhaps the real objection could be association, and the feeling that by joining forces (even on as tangental a movement as this), that’s somehow being supportive of all things homo. I have a feeling that if No Name-Calling Week were started by the RNC, minus inspiration from “The Misfits,” we’d hear nary a whisper about it from these people.
Next, Throckmorton will likely boycott rainbows, Spongebob, and fashion.
[Also published at American Samizdat.]