While appearing on AFR Mornings with host Frank Turek on the American Family Association’s American Family Radio, anti-gay activist Michael Brown said that gay rights advocates are making LGBT youth who commit suicide “pawns in a larger political agenda” because they know “it’s a whole lot harder” for their opponents “to look at a kid and a family where there’s a suicide.” Brown, who blamed gay rights supporters for the murder of California fifteen year-old Lawrence King, told Turek that increased attention to suicides by LGBT teenagers are making people ignore other teenagers who commit suicide.
Of course, Brown offered no evidence to back up his claim that concerns about suicide among LGBT youth are undercutting efforts to prevent suicide in general. The Suicide Prevention Resource Center reported in 2008 that lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth “are nearly one and a half to three times more likely to have reported suicidal ideation” and “nearly one and a half to seven times more likely than non-LGB youth to have reported attempting suicide,” noting that “stigma and discrimination are directly tied to risk factors for suicide.”
Later, Brown called gay rights advocates “completely intolerant” and Turek, who has called homosexuality a “road to destruction,” labeled them “the most intolerant people out there.”
Brown: For every one kid, gay teen, that commits suicide because of bullying or because parents say ‘homosexuals go to hell’ or because they just feel ‘I have no future, I have no hope, I can never marry’ and so on, these should be weighty issues to us as Christians, this should hurt us, what if it’s our own kid? That’s why we need to look at every kid. But for every one that commits suicide for that cause, there are--is it dozens, is it scores, I don’t know the exact stats how it breaks down--but a whole lot more kids who commit suicide for other reasons, we never hear about them in the news! We don’t hear national campaigns about them!
So for me what is so concerning is these kids become pawns in a larger political agenda because it’s a whole lot harder to look at a kid and a family where there’s a suicide, it’s a whole lot harder to look at that and hold to our convictions than it is to look at say two forty year old men that want to be married. So we need a compassionate response but boy is this being utilized to push a whole agenda on our society and then an agenda that is completely intolerant, you cannot hold to your views.
Turek: The folks who say they are fighting for tolerance are the most intolerant people out there.
