Bill-13, GSAs and shitty parenting

Normally when you meet people who are as thick-headed and incapable of learning as the parents who are voting against anti-bullying bills, it’s best to be as polite and cordial as possible, since chances are their mothers drank paint thinner through their pregnancies.

If this were an issue where things were a little less black and white, I might grant them the benefit of the doubt. That being said, when you have a slew of gay kids saying, “Fuck this, I can’t take the bullies calling me a fag anymore” and then they kill themselves, it’s kind of hard to justify not doing everything you can to ensure they aren’t driven to suicide. Unless you have a really old, contradictory, morally vague book that you base all your morals on. In which case, it’s still dumb as shit and you’re just scapegoating.

Here’s the thing: as a parent, you have every right in the world to be terrible. In your own home. You have every right to pass on and enforce your values system to your kids, regardless of whether or not every aspect of reality has proven you wrong. In your own home. You have the right to teach your kids that gay kids are going to hell and that dinosaur bones were planted in the earth to trick scientists, and people who are left-handed are robots.

In. Your. Own. Home.

But when your crappy parenting starts affecting people outside of your home, when kids start bullying the so-called “faggots” into putting guns in their mouths or beating the shit out of them for being different, guess what? That’s where the line is drawn, and people start calling your shit.

You have the right to believe whatever you want. You believe God nailed his own son to a tree? Sure, why not. Aliens blew up a volcano and now their ghosts make you sad? Go ahead. You believe a millionaire orphan dresses up as a bat and fights crime? Hey, that shit’s in a book too, so by all means, do it. But you can’t enforce that belief on people, especially when science and reality are screaming “NO, THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF THE THING YOU BELIEVE IN IS THE TRUTH.”

Freedom of religion is not the same as freedom of being a dickhead consequence-free. All Bill-13 is meant to do is ensure that gay kids are allowed to be themselves without getting punched to death. That’s it. Yes, part of that might entail that your kids are going to learn about people who aren’t like them, but learning about people who aren’t heteronormative isn’t going to turn your kids gay anymore than learning about Martin Luther King, Jr will turn them black.

Look, people have the right to believe the things they want to, as long as it doesn’t infringe on or hurt others. But right now, kids are being told they’re lesser people for being gay and they’re killing themselves over it. Christianity is about treating people with love and compassion, not making people feel like shit for being different. If the central ideology behind your belief system is “people are different, so fuck ‘em,” guess what? You picked wrong.