Courage Campaign FlashMob (video Sunday)

At the California State Republican Convention late last year:

Does Bachmann's school district condone bullying?

There have been a number of suicides in the school district in Michelle Bachmann's MN Congressional district. The NY Times tells us

After years of harsh conflict between advocates for gay students and Christian conservatives, the issue was already highly charged here. Then in July, six students brought a lawsuit contending that school officials have failed to stop relentless antigay bullying and that a district policy requiring teachers to remain “neutral” on issues of sexual orientation has fostered oppressive silence and a corrosive stigma.

Also this summer, parents and students here learned that the federal Department of Justice was deep into a civil rights investigation into complaints about unchecked harassment of gay students in the district. The inquiry is still under way.

Through it all, conservative Christian groups have demanded that the schools avoid any descriptions of homosexuality or same-sex marriage as normal, warning against any surrender to what they say is the “homosexual agenda” of recruiting youngsters to an “unhealthy and abnormal lifestyle.”

Adding an extra incendiary element, the school district has suffered eight student suicides in the last two years, leading state officials to declare a “suicide contagion.”

So, kids are dying. Gay children (or those perceived as gay) are relentlessly bullied, to the extent it is a CIVIL RIGHTS issue-- they are deprived of education.

Gay children, and some parents and supporters, say these efforts are undercut by what they call the district’s “gag order” on discussion of sexual diversity — a policy, adopted in 2009 amid searing public debate, that “teaching about sexual orientation is not part of the district-adopted curriculum” and that staff “shall remain neutral on matters regarding sexual orientation.”

And the response of so called "Christians"? Read on:

But conservative parents have organized to lobby against change. “Saying that you should accept two moms as a normal family — that would be advocacy,” said Tom Prichard, president of the Minnesota Family Council. “There should be no tolerance of bullying, but these groups are using the issue to try to press a social agenda.”

Read that again. "Saying you should accept two moms as a normal family...." Thus, the fact that two mom-families exist, and are normal, is denied. The very fact of our being as families is attacked.

A group of district parents who are closely allied with the family council declined to be interviewed. Their Web site says that depression among gay teenagers is often the fault of gay rights advocates who create hopelessness: “When a child has been deliberately misinformed about the causes of homosexuality and told that homosexual acts are normal and natural, all hope for recovery is taken away.”

Make no mistake, these people are attacking our children, and then blaming us for their deaths. But they want them dead. Good Christians all?

What the culture war really is about

Do you remember the scorn from the Bush administration some years ago, claiming to make "their own reality"? It's a symptom of the "culture wars". From Forbes:

[T]he so called “culture wars” that 150 years later are now back in full swing with a couple of stories that hit the news this week. The counseling center Michele Bachmann co-owns with her husband was shown to practice discredited and potentially harmful therapies intended to use prayer, counseling, and coercion to convert same sex attractions to heterosexual attraction. Then Tim Pawlenty made demonstrably false claims about a “scientific dispute” that does not exist as to whether or not same sex attractions are a choice: they are not and there is no scientific dispute, there is a scientific consensus.

Now, if you are not a member of the LGBT community or a partisan on the religious right, you might think, like those who travelled to Bull Run, you are merely a spectator to a battle. You may have a favored side, like an entertaining reality show, but one that is actually reality. You may even be passionate about which side you want to win. But if you think you are simply watching something being fought by others, you would be wrong. You are a full participant, as are all Americans. What’s at stake is nothing less than how our country will think about and try to solve the problems we face. The culture wars we watch are really psychological wars in which we are fighting about how and with what we will think.

One of the issues about which you are a perhaps unwitting combatant is the question of whether both sides are fighting with the same weapons. They are not. One side fights with scientific curiosity, professional consensus, and professional doubt. The other uses pseudo-science and a rhetorical strategy designed to undermine the credibility of those who use data-driven arguments in conflict with cherished beliefs.

Consider the Bachmanns’ discredited counseling practices. The professional community is nearly unanimous in condemning their practice as a potentially dangerous one that does not work (and let me be clear, if they presented their work as a faith-based ministry rather than a mental health counseling center asking for and receiving Medicaid reimbursement I’d probably have nothing to say about what they are doing, it’s the counseling not the Christian part of what they are doing that is the problem)

... Whether you’re trying to decide between different economic solutions to our nation’s problems, to figure out how to generate more revenue or get more customers for your business, or crafting a treatment plan to help a struggling adolescent find his way through a hornet’s nest of painful conflict, you have to be able to tolerate the stress of making decisions in conditions of uncertainty without imposing the certainty of ideological order. You have to constantly monitor whether what you’re doing is working or not.

Wishing won’t make it so not matter how fervent, or ideologically pure the wish.