”Forced sex, childhood sexual abuse, dating violence, early unwed pregnancy, substance abuse — could these be a more important factor in the increased suicide risk of LGBT high schoolers than anything people like me ever said?”
Maggie Gallagher, president of the extremely anti-gay National Organization for Marriage. Here she writes another defensive opinion piece. She insinuates that no matter what she says or how often she preaches negative things about gay people and marriage, gay children will kill themselves at the same rate. Homophobia, she seems to say, is not the source of gay teen suicide.
Gallagher then makes the argument that perhaps gay teenagers are sexually maladjusted; this being the case because they have been sexually abused; and that gay teens are therefore much more likely to be drug addicts, pregnant, and commit violent acts while dating. Therefore, she alludes, it’s a situation that is disconnected from her life’s work of standing in the way of gay marriage legalization. Oh, and quit using kids in the ”culture war,” she adds. (NY Post)
Gallagher’s plea of being unable to influence the lives of gay youth seems fairly ridiculous, especially when members of NOM boasted of their ability to get voters to repeal gay marriage in California and Maine.
Her organization also distributed numerous advertisements against students’ rights to view positive images of gay people at school. Their latest ad even goes so far as to use an image of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr — as if he was supportive of their anti-gay cause. (MLK had no known position on LGBT rights, but his wife Coretta Scott King was fully in favor of gay marriage.)
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