Wear Purple in Honor of 7 Gay Teens Who Commited Suicide Due To Homophobia

[zobothehobo]

I had a discussion a while ago about "Gay pride" with a friend. She said that she couldn't understand why it was ok to say "I am gay and proud of it" I told her it was because people were constantly telling the gay community they should be ashamed.

My young son called my other son "Gayboy" as an insult two days ago. I was gob smacked, I sat my son down and had a long chat with him about what he had said, when I told this story to friends they thought I was over-reacting.

What gets me is this, the police came into my sons school the other week to talk about hate crime. They centred the whole workshop on crimes against black people. Of course this needs to be addressed but not once did they mention either gay bashing (I prefer this term as I think "homophobia" means something else) or anti-Islamic sentiment. Given that the latter two are far more socially acceptable at the moment I was pretty disgusted. My kids are young, as far as they are concerned now hate crime just means racism.

I can't help but think that the schools have a big role here, by teaching that victimising one group is wrong whilst neglecting to mention the others, to me, reinforces the idea that some groups are less worthy of protection than others.

This post isn't overly fluent, I hope you all can see the relation between the anecdotes.

I agree 100%. When I was in elementary school, the big thing was "the gay sign." held your index finger coming out on the middle of your open palm facing someone and that was supposed to mean they were gay and had to stay away from you. I always thought it was stupid before I knew what the word gay meant, but I did it one day at home... my grandmother was disgusted and sat me down and told me what that meant. I had seen my dad kissing guys before so I was disgusted with myself too. I hadn't really made a distinction between the sexualities... they were just normal. The next day at school, I saw some kids doing it and told them to stop, then I went to the teachers and told them what those kids were doing and I said it was mean to people like my dad who didn't do anything to them. The teachers told me it wasn't a big deal and that my dad would be used to stuff like this, or he should get used to it, then they walked off. Back then, I thought "ok..." Now I see how awful and disgusting that behavior is. It starts in elementary school when kids are taught it's ok to be prejudice.

 

[Wishing Oceans]

I had a discussion a while ago about "Gay pride" with a friend. She said that she couldn't understand why it was ok to say "I am gay and proud of it" I told her it was because people were constantly telling the gay community they should be ashamed.

My young son called my other son "Gayboy" as an insult two days ago. I was gob smacked, I sat my son down and had a long chat with him about what he had said, when I told this story to friends they thought I was over-reacting.

What gets me is this, the police came into my sons school the other week to talk about hate crime. They centred the whole workshop on crimes against black people. Of course this needs to be addressed but not once did they mention either gay bashing (I prefer this term as I think "homophobia" means something else) or anti-Islamic sentiment. Given that the latter two are far more socially acceptable at the moment I was pretty disgusted. My kids are young, as far as they are concerned now hate crime just means racism.

I can't help but think that the schools have a big role here, by teaching that victimising one group is wrong whilst neglecting to mention the others, to me, reinforces the idea that some groups are less worthy of protection than others.

This post isn't overly fluent, I hope you all can see the relation between the anecdotes.

Completely agreed. School really is a place where people get away with gay-related discrimination all too often!

Actually, I'm not sure if I've told this story before, but... When I was in 3rd grade I was anti-gay for a few hours. Why? Well, during lunch, some of my sister's friends were saying that I was lesbian because I hugged my friends a lot (Boy, would I like to smack those people!). Being an impressionable young childe, I understood the negative connotations that they had put on the word (Especially since they were laughing and telling me I should stop) and took it to mean that being gay/lesbian was a bad thing, even though I had never actually thought about it before. So, a couple hours later I was home, and I said something anti-gay in front of my mom. She went completely psycho and lectured me. And since then I've been 100% pro- gay rights, in school and outside of school.

So I'm very glad that you took the time to lecture your son! It helps in the long run, it really does. After all, when you're talking about children... When you're blaming a child, you're blaming the adult that made them that way. We all have a duty to teach my generation tolerance, and some parents/teachers simply fail at that.