Mix It Up Day, a national school day where students are encouraged to sit with kids at lunch that they don’t usually, seems like an innocuous way to try to reduce bullying by introducing kids to new classmates. But leave it to Bryan Fischer, the public face of the anti-gay American Family Association, to find a secret gay plan in the works.
Fischer, whose organization has been labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (which sponsors Mix It Up Day), told the New York Times that the anti-bullying effort was, like all anti-bullying legislation, “just another thinly veiled attempt to promote the homosexual agenda:”
No one is in favor of anyone getting bullied for any reason, but these anti-bullying policies become a mechanism for punishing Christian students who believe that homosexual behavior is not something that should be normalized.
Even setting aside that Mix It Up literature doesn’t explicitly mention LGBT students or that Fischer’s proposed solution of keeping students at home will only result in kids not learning, Fischer’s analysis of the situation is hopelessly contradictory. Bullying is, by definition, an attempt to mark LGBT students as “not normal” and hence exclude them from mainstream school life. Saying that students should be free to marginalize their peers whenever they exhibit behavior deemed to be “homosexual” is demanding license for bullying, full-stop. That’s why rules proposed by organizations like Fischer’s ostensibly aimed to protect religious students read like codes legalizing bullying.
Fischer has a long history of demonizing LGBT youth and families: he has called adoption by LGBT parents “a form of sexual abuse” and has urged the creation of an “Underground Railroad” to kidnap children away from LGBT households.
Previous in TP LGBT
By clicking and submitting a comment I acknowledge the ThinkProgress Privacy Policy and agree to the ThinkProgress Terms of Use. I understand that my comments are also being governed by Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policies as applicable, which can be found here.