It’s easy for teenagers to assume that everything in high school is this unending hellhole from which they’ll never escape. It’s not hard to see why either: most of their lives and memories revolve around school, and when you’re young and full of hormones, it’s easy to confuse one single era of your life as a representation of its entirety.
If you haven’t been following Andrea Houston on Twitter, now would be an excellent time to start; she’s been reporting on everything that’s been happening in and around Queen’s Park during the Bill 13 debates. Anyway, she’s managed to represent a pretty wide swath of voices on the subject. There are plenty of people coming out in support of GSAs, and there have also been those opposing the bill, from both personal viewpoints (“This is a serious issue that has to end, and it won’t end with Bill 13. The accountability in Bill 14 will help”) and from crazy, batshit weirdness (see: literally anybody claiming Bill 13 would result in underage gay orgies).
The thing is, kids in high school need all the support they can get. All kids. But whether you like it or not, LGBT kids experience some of the highest rates of bullying. Hell, even as adults, LGBT people have the highest rates of victimization when it comes to hate crimes. If kids want to come together and tell people that it’s okay to love who you love and be who you want to be, why get in the way of that?
And cut the crap about how Christians are being persecuted because gay teen boys are dating other gay teen boys. Believe me, I grew up gay AND Catholic. Guess which one I got the most flack for? I liked who I liked, and I believed what I wanted to believe. Both of these things affected only myself and myself alone. But being gay was the only part that I ever got bullied for. Let me make this clear: it’s not okay to bully people for their sexuality or their religion. That being said, Christianity is not based entirely around being gay; pretending it is, claiming persecution, and then trying to subjugate an entire group of people is a crock of shit.
(Image from slapupsidethehead.com)
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