How to Talk to Kids About Homosexuality: Tell Them Being Gay Is Just Like Overeating

Mission: America, Linda Garvey’s anti-gay/pro-bigot advocacy group, recently released a guide that’s supposed to help adults talk to kids about homosexuality and bullying. Oh, goody.

Friends should never be unkind and insult each other, Garvey instructs, but that doesn’t mean that being gay is right, obviously. Just talk shit about your super gay friends behind their back! She explains that homosexuality is wrong for a bunch of boring “grown-up” reasons that she just really doesn’t feel like getting into right now…

Most cultures long ago decided this was very wrong. And they made rules against
it, for a lot of good reasons (more grown-up stuff). First of all, two men can never
create their own child. Neither can two women. And two men kissing— well, it just
doesn’t seem right. That’s because it isn’t!

…because, if she gets into it, she’s just going to make stuff up:

And, a lot of people who don’t even believe in God agree. From Asia to India to
Africa to Latin America, most people now and throughout history agree that being
homosexual or “gay” is wrong.

You guys, this woman polled the ENTIRE WORLD so we better listen.

“…if you hear that everyone thinks being “gay” is okay, don’t believe it — even if that person is a grown-up, or even if he leads a church,” Garvey writes. Aye Aye, hateful captain! But what about bullying? Ugh. Hard one! Bullying is “always wrong,” but telling people that being gay or transgender is okay is even wronger:

…it’s not right to tell someone that being homosexual is okay. The person may be feeling sad because of being bullied, but never try to make him or [sic] feel better by saying “gay” is okay.

Kids who are overweight are sometimes bullied, too. And we might want to make that person feel better. But it would be a mistake to say that overeating is a good thing, right? So tell your friends, in a nice way, that no one needs to be “gay” or pretend to be the other gender. It’s not the right thing to do.

That analogy obviously falls flat, but the connection between anti-gay and anti-obesity movements isn’t new; recently, Paul Campos wrote about how telling fat people they ought to be thin is just as unhelpful as telling gay people they should be straight:

The extent to which the construction of “obesity” as a social problem has paralleled the history of the medical establishment’s construction of the concept of “homosexuality” can be seen by comparing the cures put forth for these purported diseases.

To a remarkable degree, attempts to cure obesity resemble attempted cures for homosexuality, with the key difference being that while our public health authorities have come to denounce the latter as ineffective, unnecessary and ultimately harmful, they continue to employ the most extreme rhetoric in regard to the former. For example, the goal of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign is no less than to “end childhood obesity within a generation,” that is, to create an America with no fat children in it.

Campos raises some interesting ideas: it might be helpful to think about the anti-obesity movement in terms of the anti-gay movement. But it goes without saying that it’s most definitely not helpful to give kids — 82 percent of whom say they’ve been verbally harassed for their sexual orientation, according to a recent survey — mixed messages about how the evils of homosexuality are worse than hurting your peers.

Hate Group Teaches Children To Compare Homosexuality To Overeating [Think Progress]