Bullying gay kids = Healthy discouragement of 'bad' behaviour.

First, some stats:

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77% of all bullying victims are picked on due to sexual orientation, gender identity, or the perception of either. LGBT youth are up to five times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight counterparts.

Sauce

Now... The response from Tea party activist (Qualifier: Spokesperson for Tea Party Nation, an affiliated group) and member of ACT for America (An anti-Muslim group that has claimed that America is facing White "Extinction" In America) says this:

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This is not bullying. It is peer pressure and is healthy. There are many bad behaviors such as smoking, under age drinking and drug abuse that are behaviors that cannot be condoned. Homosexuality falls into this category. Homosexuality is simply bad behavior that youth see as such and rightly pressure their peers to stop it.

Write up here

And if that wasn't reprehensible enough...

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I agree with Gulf Coast Gives that "LGBT youth are up to five times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight counterparts". Homosexuality, like drugs, harms young people if they experement [sic] with it. That is the greatest tragedy.

Fucking scumbag.

I'm not even going to read this because it's about kids and I'm going to lose my shit. I'm sure you guys can cover all my points with less screaming.

Healthy discouragement of bad behavior?!

FUUUU--

Bullying is never healthy, and there's nothing wrong with homosexuality. I've met a number of gay teens, and they're no more obnoxious than straight teens (no less, either). And bullying that drives a person to suicide is tantamount to murder, IMHO.

To call ACT for America's attitude sick would be a gross understatement.

What I want to know is, how high up in the organization is this asshat? If he's sufficiently low-ranking they might have to turn on him and denounce what he said (if, of course, there's enough public pressure to do so).

fapfapfap wrote:

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This.

What the fucking fuck. Idiots. What the Hell is wrong with them? YOU DON'T CHOOSE TO BE GAY. GET IT THROUGH YOUR HEADS.

I ....can't. I just can't. Stuff like this just shows how immoral these "family values" and "traditional marriage" people truly are.

See, they won't ever accept the fact that people don't choose to be gay. Why? Because that will mean that "God made them that way," and will challenge the very core base of their homophobia religious belief system idiocy.

So, it is worth it to let bullies go unchecked, as long as this results in a few faggots beaten up.
When the bully picks on kids because they're poor, wearing glasses, or the teacher's pet, that is collateral damage. Can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, right?
Don't worry when the bully, 10 years down the line, can't hold a job because he's never been taught to handle things without resorting to violence: he'll have fond memories of Lesbia McDyke with her head in the toilet to keep him good company.

This reasoning is particularly loathsome because bullies are troubled kids in need of help, not mindless tools that do the dirty job on your behalf. Even if he didn't give a shit about LGBT, you'd think he'd want the gay-bashing jocks to succeed. But noo, all that matters is beating up queers."Divide et impera", anyone?

Bullying is peer pressure to modify behavior so that undesirable behavior gets weeded out of the pack? Do I have that right? Okay.

Well, scenario. I find the behavior of a certain Tea Party member absolutely repugnant. Let's not name names. So I launch a campaign to make that certain person's life miserable. I spread rumors through the wonder that is the Internet that the certain Tea Party member is after interns, can't be trusted in the locker room, or, hey, is stealing funds. I post their address everywhere on Facebook and Twitter, so that everyone can go spray paint "JACKASS" in bright red letters on the side of their house. I make their life a nightmare for months on end.

Now, most normal people would call my little campaign bullying and also really illegal.

But under this certain Tea Party member's definition, I'm just using peer pressure to remove unwanted behavior from the group at large, mainly, being a fucking tool.

What a fun social experiment that would be.

I love how there was that unspoken "And, well, if they happen to kill themselves because of it... all the better!" in there.

Fucking excellent.

Christ on a bike.

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This is not bullying.

YES IT IS

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It is peer pressure and is healthy. There are many bad behaviors such as smoking, under age drinking and drug abuse that are behaviors that cannot be condoned. Homosexuality falls into this category. Homosexuality is simply bad behavior that youth see as such and rightly pressure their peers to stop it.

Gotta love the message here: "If you are homosexual THEN YOU DESERVE TO BE BULLIED. IF YOU END UP COMMITTING SUICIDE, THEN IT'S YOUR FAULT. IT WOULDN'T HAVE HAPPENED IF YOU WEREN'T A GODDAMN QUEER IN THE FIRST PLACE."

Stay classy, Dr. Swier.

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77% of all bullying victims are picked on due to sexual orientation, gender identity, or the perception of either.

Way to grossly inflate your numbers by adding any kid who was, at some point during his life, called a faggot, even if the person meant it more as a general insult and not literal remark on the victim's sexual orientation.

Lady Anne wrote:

And bullying that drives a person to suicide is tantamount to murder, IMHO.

So, tell me, do you not know what IMHO stands for or do you not know the meaning of the word "humble"? Or is it both, you illiterate tumor?

And thank God the law mostly doesn't agree with you. Some kid kills himself because lulz and everyone who insulted him in the past month faces a felony indictment. There's also the slight way that would incentivize suicide for a bullying victim. "Hey, my life sucks and I think I might end it. Naw, that's a little too extreme. If only there were some way to get back at the bullies. Something like framing them for murder... OH HAY, this makes suicide much more appealing."

Idiot

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It is peer pressure and is healthy. There are many bad behaviors such as smoking, under age drinking and drug abuse that are behaviors that cannot be condoned. Homosexuality falls into this category. Homosexuality is simply bad behavior that youth see as such and rightly pressure their peers to stop it.

Um...genius, peer pressure is never healthy. All those other undesirable behaviors you mentioned, the non-being gay ones, it's been known to cause those. I do love a good moronic contradiction.

I wonder what would happen if this guy's own children turn out to be gay.

Actually, I already know. I have enough LGBT friends to know what happens when a homophobe finds out his/her child is gay, and I don't wish that on anyone's children.

maladroit_mooncalf wrote:

Quote :

It is peer pressure and is healthy. There are many bad behaviors such as smoking, under age drinking and drug abuse that are behaviors that cannot be condoned. Homosexuality falls into this category. Homosexuality is simply bad behavior that youth see as such and rightly pressure their peers to stop it.

Um...genius, peer pressure is never healthy. All those other undesirable behaviors you mentioned, the non-being gay ones, it's been known to cause those. I do love a good moronic contradiction.

Jeez, I know. I am picturing the school bully giving everyone shit for drinking under-age in my head right now and it does not compute.

Reepicheep-chan wrote:

maladroit_mooncalf wrote:

Quote :

It is peer pressure and is healthy. There are many bad behaviors such as smoking, under age drinking and drug abuse that are behaviors that cannot be condoned. Homosexuality falls into this category. Homosexuality is simply bad behavior that youth see as such and rightly pressure their peers to stop it.

Um...genius, peer pressure is never healthy. All those other undesirable behaviors you mentioned, the non-being gay ones, it's been known to cause those. I do love a good moronic contradiction.

Jeez, I know. I am picturing the school bully giving everyone shit for drinking under-age in my head right now and it does not compute.

The only reason bullies can't find for giving underage drinkers shit is that they aren't sharing any.

Actually, bullies will be the first ones showing their resourcefulness by getting hold of liquors and tobacco before minimal age - and prove their toughness by consuming large quantities of both. Isn't it cool to breathe smoke in the face of little Wimpy Asthman and cause him an attack? Or threatening to extinguish your cigarette in the right eye of a quivering freshman?

The bullyism-as-betterment-of-the society shtick does not exist outside the brain of its descriptor. In short: Pull the other one, Dwier.

Mikey inadvertently brings up an interesting point.

if anti-gay bullying is considered ok, kids can be controlled simply by the suggestion of being associated with gayness. Or with the thread of being gay.

"Kyle, I think that green shirt is pretty faggoty"

Well, nobody wants to be a faggot, so green shirts are now gone.

It would be a new witch hunting device (Not that it isn't already in some areas)

TL;DR version: This stinks.

Long version:

If you really think about it, this all boils down to insecurity. Some people are so insecure in their own person, that they feel threatened by anything different and respond the only way they can. With violence.

They can't approach this on a logical level, because if they did, they would have to admit that sexual orientation is deeply rooted in the brain and not a choice. If they admitted that, then they would have to admit they are wrong, and for some people, that is tantamount to being asked to shoot themselves in the head.

So they engage in contortions of logic that end up with them being worse off, mentally, than they were when they began.

I have yet to see a parent successfully discourage their infant from eating by smacking them around and have the child survive. Being of any orientation is as natural as eating and breathing. (I would include defecating, but you know how some people like to connect the dots...)

So, to use a destructive behavior, ie. Bullying, to discourage a natural behavior, ie. sexual orientation, not only harms the child being bullied. It harms the bully by reducing him or her down to a non-entity to be used as a tool.

There is a third victim in all of this. And this victim is self-victimized. The ones using the bullies in the first place to discourage a natural behavior that threatens them because it's something they hate about themselves.

In short, everybody loses when we all can't be honest with ourselves.

Hey, if we need to use bullying as a discouragement why don't we form bully squads for all schools? Make the little fuckers SCARED to ever drink or smoke. Fuck, while we're at it let's beat the shit out of kids who are thinking of cheating on a test. How will we know who is cheating? The bully squad will know, just by the look in their eyes.

Mikey Go WOOGA wrote:

Some kid kills himself because lulz and everyone who insulted him in the past month faces a felony indictment. There's also the slight way that would incentivize suicide for a bullying victim. "Hey, my life sucks and I think I might end it. Naw, that's a little too extreme. If only there were some way to get back at the bullies. Something like framing them for murder... OH HAY, this makes suicide much more appealing."

Okay, I know a lot of people here (including myself) tend to ignore Mikey for the most part, but in all fairness he has a point here. If people can be bullied to the point where they think that suicide is the only way out, it's also equally likely that people could be bullied to the point where they could think that suicide is the only way to get those assholes punished since no one else is doing jack shit about it.

Plus, like a lot of other well-meaning laws, criminalizing bullying would be completely subjective and could be used in a way to punish innocent people for no wrongdoing at all. I'm not saying bullies shouldn't be punished (of course they should!), but specifically bringing the law into it is probably not a particularly good idea.

Then what would you suggest we do, Aggie? This isn't something new-I was bullied all through Junior High and well into high school for being 'weird' (a short, plump, not very pretty girl who was more interested in science fiction and fantasy than boys). This was back in the 1970s. Eventually, I found my own little group of outcasts to band together with, but if you think it didn't leave permanent scars, you know nothing about how psychology works. To t his day, I have trouble making friends and trusting people. Thankfully, now that I'm older, I no longer particularly give a shit if anyone approves of me or not, but when you're a teenager, that sort of thing is important. My son didn't come out to me till after he graduated high school (he knew he was gay when he was in Middle School, but he also saw what happened to those who were open about it). The only person who knew the truth was his twin brother, and he kept his secret all that time. He survived school by ducking and covering, by going along with the homophobic jokes and praying to God that nobody would notice him getting dressed for gym class in the rest room. And this was in the 1990s. He came out to me in 1998, after he and his brother graduated from high school and moved into their own apartment because he'd seen kids come out in high school and have their family kick them out into the streets. Or undergo constant harassment by the other students, up to and including getting beaten up. He's not proud of what he did, but it was a matter of survival. The only thing that bothers me is that he had to live that way and that he honestly thought I'd reject him just because he was gay.

Gays aren't the only kids who get harassed-anyone who's viewed as 'different' is going to be bullied. The problem is that kids are a vicious bunch, and if they decide that someone is gay (based on totally arbitrary stereotypes they learned on Daddy's knee), they're going to harass them even if they AREN'T gay. And once they've decided they're gay, not amount of proof (up to and including having sex with a girl in front of them) is going to convince them otherwise.

Once you get marked as 'different,' it sticks. Thankfully for my son, most of my family has been completely accepting of him (the ones who aren't we don't bother with). Not all gay kids are that lucky. On top of bullying, they have to put up with their own parents disowning them because of their sexual orientation, and being rejected by friends who can't handle the truth about their sexuality.

So yeah, it is a big problem, and there are times when the police DO need to be brought into it. Also, the psychological abuse can be just as, if not more, painful, than the physical abuse, because it undermines their sense of self-worth and makes them hate themselves for something that they have no control over. Most people wouldn't dream of walking up to someone who was born with spina bifida and is in a wheelchair and say to them "You know, you could get up and walk if you really wanted to." But they don't see the incongruity of walking up to someone who's gay and saying "You could be straight if you really wanted to."