Mission America’s Linda Harvey has consistently claimed that anti-bullying efforts that include preventing bullying against LGBT and LGBT-perceived students will lead to discrimination against straight, Christian students at the hands of “destructive” and “criminal” activists in the “gaystapo.” Of course, she and her other Religious Right anti-anti-bullying activists have never produced any actual evidence that this was occurring, but since she claims to be an ardent defender of students’ First Amendment rights, we wondered how she would react to a dispute in Celina, Ohio, regarding the rights of students to wear t-shirts supportive of gay rights:
The debate at Celina High School started after two female high school students celebrated the high school's "Twin Day" last week by wearing shirts to school that read "Lesbian 1" and "Lesbian 2" on the back. They were promptly asked to remove the T-shirts, according to students there.
On Tuesday, some 20 students decided to show their support of the girls by wearing their own T-shirts to school. The shirts read: "I support..." with a photo of a rainbow. "Express yourself."
Jimmy Walter, a sophomore at the public high school, says he organized the T-shirts in defense of his older sister, one of the female students who wore the Twin Day shirts. "My sister got yelled at and screamed at [by administrators], and she was basically told she was unwanted at the school because she was gay," he says.
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"[Our high] school promotes their pro-life club called the 'Students for Life". They have their own shirts, which have a fetus and promotes pro-life," Warner wrote on Reddit, in a post about the incident that has now gone viral on the social news site. "How is that not considered "political"?
While Harvey has previously argued that students who oppose gay equality should not be “intimidated into self-censoring their First Amendment rights,” naturally, she believes that schools should prohibit pro-gay rights t-shirts…just like they prohibit bullying.
She went on to argue that “if schools allow views on homosexuality to be aired at all, then it always shall be to discourage this behavior and these false identities,” and that schools should make gay students “get the counseling they need.”
We teach our children not to be bystanders if they see someone bullied, likewise responsible grownups should not be bystanders as children are presented harmful, misleading and increasingly corrupting ideas. For instance, should a school allow explicit pro-abortion t-shirts? Absolutely not, because even most liberals know in their heart that abortion is a horrible practice, in fact they do everything they can to keep blinders on about its reality so their consciences don’t have to wrestle with the violence involved. There is objective truth, right and wrong, and sometimes our schools seem to have forgotten that. The same is true about homosexuality, if schools allow views on homosexuality to be aired at all, then it always shall be to discourage this behavior and these false identities. If the truth was being told about this behavior, it would be obvious why it should be discouraged and any teen struggling with these feelings would get the counseling they need.
