Congratulations to my dear friends at the Illinois Family Institute! They just made the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of anti-gay Hate Groups… again:
Want an example of their wretched ideology? On the Day of Silence (a student-led initiative to raise awareness about the “silencing effect of anti-LGBT bullying”), IFI wants parents to remove their kids from the classroom (emphasis theirs):
Call your children’s middle and high schools and ask if students and/or teachers will be permitted to refuse to speak during class on Friday, April 20, 2012. If your administration allows students and/or teachers to refuse to speak during class, call your child out of school. Every student absence costs school districts money.
When administrators refuse to listen to reason and when they allow the classroom to be exploited for political purposes, parents must take action. If they don’t, the politicization of the classroom and curricula will increase.
To paraphrase: If your kids’ school gives students a chance to show tolerance and respect toward LGBT individuals, don’t let your kids get an education! Homophobia begins at home, dammit!
In case you’re wondering what qualifies IFI as a hate group, the SPLC says this:
For Christian Right leaders, the gay rights movement and its so-called “homosexual agenda” are the prime culprits in the destruction of American society and culture. In the words of Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, the battle against gay rights is essentially a “second civil war” to put control of the U.S. government in the right hands, meaning those who reject gay rights.
The religious right in America has employed a variety of strategies in its efforts to beat back the increasingly confident gay rights movement. One of those has been defamation. Many of its leaders have engaged in the crudest type of name-calling, describing LGBT people as “perverts” with “filthy habits” who seek to snatch the children of straight parents and “convert” them to gay sex. They have disseminated disparaging “facts” about gays that are simply untrue — assertions that are remarkably reminiscent of the way white intellectuals and scientists once wrote about the “bestial” black man and his supposedly threatening sexuality.
But who needs facts when you have the Bible…?
