Real family values

This week, gentlemen and ladies, the homosexual agenda is once again focused on protecting children.
What? You thought the Christian right was working to protect children?
Think again.
As evidence we present for your enlightenment two stories in this week's issue and one that is scheduled to run on July 6. In the first, a Republican is refusing to allow a bill to protect Michigan's children from bullies to move forward. In the next, yet another Republican legislator has pushed a bill through his committee that would allow adoption agencies to refuse to place children according to the agencies' written policies about their "morals." (Read that, "We don't like gays.") In next week's issue, we report on the trend that there has been a statistically significant increase in the number of HIV infections in 13-24 year olds. Community AIDS leaders, two of them anyway, are blaming that trend on abstinence-based sex education, which was pushed through by the Christian right.
Get the picture, folks?
While the Christian right and its political wing, the Republican Party, has proved itself willing to hurt children in order to protect politically expedient "morality," the LGBT community and our allies have been in the forefront of the fight to protect children. By protecting them from bullies. By fighting to ensure that they get to live in a home with two parents who love, care for, and have a legal relationship with them. And by making sure that our children, at least, are able to make informed decisions about sex and know what a condom is and how it's used.
We think it's sad that Between The Lines, Michigan's gay paper, seems to be the only one consistently pointing out the disparity between Christianity – a religion of love – and the Christian right, which practices a politics of discrimination, even hatred. After all, the Christian right is in power now, or at least it's created the illusion that it is, and it's the duty of the press to examine those in power, the effects or possible effects of the policies they promote, and the difference, if any, between their actions and their words. But sadly, to paraphrase Craig Covey, executive director of the Midwest AIDS Prevention Project, our political leaders aren't the only ones more afraid of the Christian right than they are of AIDS.
But while it's sad that we are frequently alone in covering these issues, and that the LGBT movement as a whole is having to take the forefront in a fight for children's welfare against those who claim to love children, we are proud of our work and of our community. Our community is Christian, it is Buddhist, it is agnostic and atheist and shamanic and Hindu and Jewish and Muslim and more – but when it comes to real family values, we stand second to no one.