Special Comment: Kitten-Kickers, QUILTBAG-haters, and the papers that enable them.

Unacceptable, I believe, would be the right way to characterize the following. It is not from the thoroughly discredited propagandist Andrew Brietbart, but it is from someone whose credibility should rank somewhere near the Incarnation of Evil's on a day when everyone is feeling generous. A lot more people got exposed to this one, because the columnist was invited by the Washington Post to pen for them. So, first, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins blames LGBT activists for the recent teenage suicides over real or perceived sexual orientation. That's in the Post. Here comes the response, with quotation of the original for critical purposes.

The media has recently been filled with reports of several recent suicides by teenagers who are reported to have been victims of "anti-gay" bullying. Some homosexual activist groups lay blame at the feet of conservative Christians who teach that homosexual conduct is wrong, as well as pro-family groups such as Family Research Council which oppose elements of the homosexual political agenda, such as same-sex "marriage."

The Christians and pro-family leaders I know are unanimous in believing that no person, especially a child, should be subjected to verbal or physical harassment or violence--whether because of their sexuality, their religious beliefs, or for any other reason. Such bullying violates the Christian's obligation to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, and receives no support from the pro-family political movement.

Where bullying has occurred, the blame should be placed on the bullies themselves--not on organizations within society who clearly oppose bullying. I suspect that few, if any, such bullies are people who regularly attend church, and I would not be surprised if most of the "bullies" did not have the positive benefit of both an active mom and dad in their lives. Religious faith and a return to traditional family values are more likely to be a solution to the problem of bullying than a cause.

As organizations do when their followers commit heinous acts, this is Tony Perkins distancing himself and the FRC from anyone who takes his pronouncements against the "homosexual agenda" and his insistence that QUILTBAG people can be cured through Jesus seriously and then act on them, escalating all the way to and through violence against "those people that stay in sin." It's the same disclaimer made by people who claim the assassin of Dr. Tiller was a lone crazy person (a claim now being brought before a federal grand jury to see if there were other people involved in motivating the assassin to do what he did). Mr. Perkins also goes one step further in claiming that No True Christian would ever support bullying a child. Othering them and saying they're a sinner and are going to hell, sure, but that's only mental violence, not physical violence. It hides the scars easier and is harder to prove you're responsible for it. And all those bullies just must have had a nontraditional family warping them from growing up properly - maybe even one of their parents was QUILLTBAG. That doesn't cut it, Tony. There are waaaaay too many examples where perfectly whole and "normal" families have exiled their children and said all sorts of hurtful things to them and about them because of their sexual orientation. Your disclaimer is a steel sieve, Tony. What other piss are you going to try and claim is pure water?

However, homosexual activist groups like GLSEN (the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network) are exploiting these tragedies to push their agenda of demanding not only tolerance of homosexual individuals, but active affirmation of homosexual conduct and their efforts to redefine the family.

There is an abundance of evidence that homosexuals experience higher rates of mental health problems in general, including depression. However, there is no empirical evidence to link this with society's general disapproval of homosexual conduct. In fact, evidence from the Netherlands would seem to suggest the opposite, because even in that most "gay-friendly" country on earth, research has shown homosexuals to have much higher mental health problems.

Within the homosexual population, such mental health problems are higher among those who "come out of the closet" at an earlier age. Yet GLSEN's approach is to encourage teens to "come out" when younger and younger--thus likely exacerbating the very problem they claim they want to solve.

Some homosexuals may recognize intuitively that their same-sex attractions are abnormal--yet they have been told by the homosexual movement, and their allies in the media and the educational establishment, that they are "born gay" and can never change. This--and not society's disapproval--may create a sense of despair that can lead to suicide.

Um, Tony. You're wrong. Completely and utterly wrong in all the particulars. The research you linked does not say what you think it does, and they even put something in teh research saying that people like you would hold it up as "proof". Fact-check your own stuff before you swing it out there, or else enjoy the flaming that comes along when everyone else does (or should. More on that later.).

The most important thing that Christians can offer to homosexuals is hope--hope that their sins, just like the sins of anyone else, can be forgiven and their lives transformed by the power of Jesus Christ. Jesus' command to love our neighbor clearly embraces the homosexual as well. But love does not require affirming every behavior in which an individual engages. For a parent to encourage a child to indulge their every desire would not be love, but its very opposite. The same is true of self-destructive behaviors in which adults may engage--whether it is the excessive use of alcohol, drugs, reckless driving, or heterosexual activity outside of marriage.

Since homosexual conduct is associated with higher rates of sexual promiscuity, sexually transmitted diseases, mental illness, substance abuse, and domestic violence, it too qualifies as a behavior that is harmful to the people who engage in it and to society at large. It is not loving to encourage someone to indulge in such activities, no matter how much sensual pleasure they may derive from them. It is more loving to help them overcome them. This is why, in the public policy arena, we will continue to oppose any policy or action that would celebrate or affirm homosexual conduct.

The model for a Christian response to homosexuals may be the story of the woman caught in adultery. When the crowd responded with violence, by gathering to stone her, Jesus said, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone." Knowing that they were all sinners, the crowd melted away. But Jesus' words to the woman he saved were crucial. He did not say, "Go, for you have not sinned." Instead, he said, "Go and sin no more."

There is no contradiction between Christian compassion and a call for holy living. But the life which is holy (from a spiritual perspective) or even healthy (from a secular perspective) requires abstinence from homosexual conduct. We would do no one a favor if we ceased to proclaim that truth.

Ah, Tony? If the most recent data you can finagle is from 2003, and the other things you link to have a severe undercurrent of "there's a serious lack of education about good practice", and pulling in the data above that strongly sugests societal pressure drives them underground and makes them depressed, concluding that they do these things because they want to is saying that they're deliberately trying to hurt themselves and do unsafe things. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and you haven't provided squat for that. Furthermore, your insistence that they can be changed through the power of Jesus, and that it is incumbent upon parents to never accept that their child is gay and to always try to convert them back to being straight is going to cause rifts, stress, and very well may exacerbate anything else happening in their life that leads toward depressed and suicidal tendencies. If you can't be out to your family, it's a huge source of stress and a giant lack of support in your life. So, again, while not directly advocating for young people to become suicidal, Mr. Perkins definitely believes that parents should put them into situations where they will be at higher risks for self-harm. He also believes that kids should repress themselves from being who they are based on poor and old data, adding to their own stress loads and likely adding to their risk. And that's before they get into the mix that is required schooling, where anything not stereotypical is the subject of mockery, bullying, and piling-on.

In short, Tony Perkins is saying that he doesn't condone bullying of people, because it's not Christian, but he definitely wants a scenario with a high probability that someone will ignore their Christian beliefs and bully someone. He wants parents to love their child, and make sure that they deny them full acceptance and love because the child isn't heternormative. He believes that people can be changed through the power of Jesus, and so their "choice" to not change should be denied the ability to benefit from tax arrangements and other legal institutions based solely on his own belief that what they are doing is wrong.

So why would the Washington Post let such a venemous thing into their paper? Because they believe that the issue of bullying people and subsequent suicides has two sides, giving credibility to Perkins and all those who think that gay children should be bullied into becoming straight, credibility they do not deserve. Bullying children to the point of their suicide is categorically wrong - it's a kicking kittens kind of question. Yet, the Post also proves that they're both lazy and cowards - lazy for not fact-checking, cowards for saying that the people who will bully QUITLBAG children, call them abominations, and tell them that even the infinitely-loving Jesus hates them and will condemn them to hell if they don't present as straight and repress an essential part of themselves deserve to have their views aired in the paper. What part of actual journalism, the search for the truth and accuracy, has you let someone print something like this without providing the Red Pen Of Doom to it, even in the opinion pages? Bloggers like me aren't expected to do that - it's what makes us such excellent bombasts and foils for each other. Journalists, on the other hand, are nominally supposed to say when the other side is composed entirely of kitten-kickers.

Blaaaaaargh. Failures on all sides.

Sforzando: Did LJ just strip out custom styling in comments?

Leave it to the RP communities to notice, because they're usually the people who stretch the platform as far as it will go to achieve the desired ends, but a little while ago, someone noticed that their comments weren't showing inline style any more. For most standard commentaries, that's not a total loss, as we tend to be agnostic about most aspects of our text, but if one were, say,

• trying to represent more than one person in a comment,


• were the kind of journal where there were multiple possible aspects talking in the same comment,


• were representing inner thoughts and outer speech,


• or were otherwise trying to make something of literary quality or that required customized sizes and fonts to get the point across,

then not being able to style the comment pretty well blows up your ability to do so. Workarounds can be made, sure, but they're usually fairly clunky. (Not to mention that everyone's imagination of flowing handwriting or a musical tone of voice is different.)

A comment thread in the news post is active, asking about this development, as is a Support request. There's a probability that someone was poking around in the code and this is an unanticipated consequence of it, and they'll track down the bug and squish it. It could be that they want to move their pages up to a more strict standard and removing inline style is part of that move.

It would be worthwhile to ask if, in the case of customized styles available for paid accounts, whether the stylesheet that users can access for a journal extends into any comments they will receive on that post, making it possible, although tedious, to replicate style-in-comments using custom tags and/or class containers that would have to be distributed to participants.

It might also be worthwhile to test out in Dreamwidth to see if they have retained those elements in comments, to see if their customized stylesheets will allow for the tedious replication, and to ask whether they have any intent to remove such options from comments any time in the future.

No need for panic or anger yet, as there's no indications as of this posting that this is a deliberate move on anyone's part or a hostile one. And it might inspire me to go poking around and see just what kind of customization is truly possible - Tabula Rasa, if it is exactly so, might end up become a style of choice for those people who need to have style control over all their elements and comments.