Sounds like a headline from the Onion, doesn’t it? Yeah, sorry, except for maybe a little gallows humor, there’s nothing funny here. It’s a paraphrase of Barb Anderson, spokes-person for the Parents Action League, which is apparently a group of conservative Christians who want to use the law to force public school students to be just like them.

Here’s the story. The short of it is that Anoka-Hennepin School District in Minnesota, an area with many recent teen suicides, is being presented with a list of demands by this PAL group. The demands are presented in this ridiculous “whereas, whereas, whereas, therefore be it resolved” format, something I’ve only ever seen in bullshit resolutions that generally seem to do nothing but waste time. (Are there any legitimate uses of that? In this century, I mean?) Anyways, the demands seem to boil down to putting Jesus in schools, adding “ex-gay”… I’m not going to call it “therapy”, let’s go with “harmful Pavlovian conditioning” to the schools’ staff training, and outright lying about various health issues, in particular AIDS, calling it “gay-related immune deficiencies” a name that hasn’t been used since the early 80s when the only known patients were a handful of gay men.

It’s difficult for me to write about this, because it makes me so angry it’s hard to think straight. “Hypocrisy” is too mild a word for this, this is like punching someone repeatedly in the face until a cop stops you, then telling the cop to arrest them for battery because your knuckles are bruised, and when your victim complains that their nose is broken and their face swollen you insist that those injuries are the cop’s fault. Except there aren’t any actual cops in this story, and the general behavior of the PAL is less overtly violent but far more asinine and dishonest.

They make the usual “gay agenda” claims, “Indoctrinating students” and the false dichotomy of gay rights vs Christian religious freedoms. They attack Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” campaign, a video campaign devoted entirely to giving bullied teenagers hope so that they don’t kill themselves, by claiming he’s talking about three-way sex and using anti-chrisitan hate rhetoric. I didn’t watch every video Dan Savage made on the subject, so maybe I missed that one.

But then, I don’t consider these people to be reliable judges of what “hate rhetoric” is, since they say things like this:

Strabala also accused progressives of persecuting those who believe that being LGBT is harmful.

I’m going to make this as clear as I can. Telling you that you’re wrong is not persecution. Calling you an asshole is not persecution. Stating that we’re not going to make a special exception to the laws guaranteeing equal protection just for your church is not persecution. Criticizing you is not persecution. Insulting you is not persecution. When I say that your plan is stupid, harmful, unethical, illegal and cruel, and that I question the sense & sanity of the people who thought it up and are promoting it, I am not persecuting you.

Persecution is enacting laws for the sole, specific, explicitly stated purpose of preventing you from marrying the consenting adult of your choice. Persecution is when someone ignores every non-crackpot psychologist of the last thirty years so they can claim you’re sick, and that through a series of Pavlovian conditioning, what amounts to systemic psychological & emotional abuse, they can “cure” you. Persecution is distorting, misrepresenting, and outright lying to others in order to make them hate and fear you. Persecution is creating an environment so hostile that you hide who you are, lying to your closest friends and family and maybe even yourself, living in constant fear of being found out. Persecution is tormenting teenagers daily to such a degree that the fucking suicide rates change. Persecution is also excusing, enabling and encouraging such behavior.

If any member of this Parents Action League wants to see the face of a persecutor, they need only look in a mirror.