Christians: Savagely Bullied

Culture Challenge of the Week: Being Christian

It’s a story that’s been largely ignored by the mainstream press–perhaps because it challenges the politically correct storyline that it’s gay teens who are persecuted and bullied. Or perhaps it’s because the bully is a man welcomed at the White House—the creator of the LGBT video crusade against bullying, “It Gets Better.”

On April 16, hundreds of teenage journalists gathered at a conference sponsored by The National Scholastic Press Association and the Journalism Education Association. Their speaker? Dan Savage, the sex columnist and gay advocate who conceived of the “It Gets Better” video campaign. His topic? Bullying.

The “It Gets Better” campaign, which aims to give gay teens an anti-suicide message—that life as an LGBT person “gets better”–has come under fire for promoting the homosexual lifestyle and normalizing deviant behavior.

But it wasn’t the video series or its message that created the problem at the event. Savage—a speaker notorious for using expletives and degrading references to sexuality—used his platform to send teens a different kind of message: that they should “ignore” the “bullsh—“ in the Bible where homosexuality is condemned. To loud applause, he mocked Scripture and called it “100%” wrong on sexual morality. (He opened his speech saying he hoped everyone in the room was using birth control.) As his vitriol increased, Christian teens rose and left the room. (See the video of Savage’s remarks here.)

Savage continued his attacks on the Bible and then made pointed, offensive remarks ridiculing the Christian students who had left the room. Nearly one hundred courageous kids had walked out feeling, ironically, “bullied” by the the anti-bullying crusader who had no qualms about mocking them for their Christian beliefs.

Savage is a sad and angry man, teeming with hatred for the Christianity in which he was raised. His past is no mystery and he never should have been invited in the first place—no matter how much these organization wanted to encourage tolerance and compassion for the victims of bullying. Savage has a history of vulgar, obscene speech and a track record, as an advice columnist, of promoting all sorts of unhealthy behaviors. The adults in charge were so eager to support the LGBT agenda that they neglected to do basic due diligence to consider whether this speaker was appropriate at all.

How to Save Your Family: Have Courage in the Face of LGBT Bullies

The parents of the teens who left Savage’s talk should stand proud of their children’s courage. The Christian students who left were clearly in the minority—and showed great courage in risking the contempt of the speaker and the mocking laughs of their peers. This kind of courage—to stand strong in the face of Christian-bashing–is needed now more than ever.

One of the saddest aspects of this situation is the number of teens who did NOT protest—even if only out of a shared decency or concern for the disrespect shown to their peers. Instead, Savage had the audience eating out of the palm of his hand. They laughed at his crude comments and cheered at his putdowns of Christianity and his disdain for the Bible. These are the future journalists of America? Tolerance, for liberals, extends only so far.

The sponsoring associations originally defended Savage’s remarks for their “thoughtfulness and deliberation,” but eventually reversed course and condemned his “use of harsh language and profanity” as “inappropriate and offensive.” They also distanced themselves from Savage’s Christian-bashing remarks, saying that “ridicule” which “belittled” believers in the Bible, “has no place in our program.”

It’s a case of too little, too late.

The image of Dan Savage–calling the Bible “bullsh—“ because of its teaching against homosexuality—is one seared forever in the minds of those teens.

And that’s just the way he planned it.

Rebecca Hagelin

Rebecca Hagelin is a public speaker on the family and culture and the author of the new best seller, 30 Ways in 30 Days to Save Your Family.

http://townhall.com/columnists/rebeccahagelin/2012/05/11/christians_savagely_bullied/page/full/

‘Gay’ anti-bully activist ‘savages’ Christians

Homosexual activist Dan Savage, recently invited to be the keynote speaker at a high school anti-bullying conference in Seattle, Wash., promptly used his podium to bash Christians so severely, droves of the students fled the auditorium, some say victims of bullying themselves.

The National High School Journalism Convention, hosted jointly by the Journalism Education Association and the National Scholastic Press Association, was supposed to give aspiring students exposure to professional journalism workshops designed to make the journalists of tomorrow the best that they can be.

One such workshop, featuring Savage, was billed in the convention program as a discussion on how to properly report on bullying.

“Student journalists cover a world where bullying, harassment and hazing are part of their experience,” says the workshop description in part.

Instead, when Savage took to the microphone, the real life exposure to bullying became all too real for the young high school students.

Savage launched into an attack on the Bible, saying, “People often point out that they can’t help it. They can’t help with the anti-gay bullying, because it says right there in Leviticus, it says right there in Timothy, it says right there in Romans, that being gay is wrong.

“We can learn to ignore the bulls— in the Bible about gay people,” he pronounced, “the same way we have learned to ignore the bulls— in the Bible about shellfish, about slavery, about dinner, about farming, about menstruation, about virginity, about masturbation. We ignore bulls— in the Bible about all sorts of things.”

In this video of the speech below, students can be seen streaming out a few at a time, but begin to leave in groups when Savage continues to blast the Bible as “a radically pro-slavery document.”

While the promoters of the conference that booked Savage billed his address by saying, “Savage is also a syndicated advice columnist. With his frank, funny advice on sex and relationships, he creates a safe space for all audiences to honestly discuss ‘taboo’ topics,” it was evident that many in the audience failed to feel safe.

While much of his audience walked out on him, Savage continued the Christian-bashing by lamenting the fact that the Apostle Paul didn’t tell a Christian slave owner “not” to own slaves, just “how” to own them.

While proclaiming that the Word of God is flawed on issues of slavery, and “got it wrong” on “the easiest moral question humanity has ever faced”, he assured his audience that the Bible is also 100 percent wrong on human sexuality and alluded to the retreating students as “pansy a–es.”

As WND has previously reported, Dan Savage is widely known as a radical, homosexual activist, who created a obscene site that redefines Rick Santorum’s last name as the byproduct of anal sex.

While Savage promotes his video sharing site, “It Gets Better,” aimed at helping homosexual teens survive bullying, but as Fox News wrote, “For some … students, they felt like the anti-bullying activist was in fact the bully.”

WND has reported on other instances of Savage’s obscene tirades:

• Savage said on HBO that he “wished all Republicans were f—ing dead.” (He later apologized.)
• Savage created “Santorum.com” and “SpreadingSantorum.com,” redefining Santorum’s surname as follows: “San-TOR-um, n. The frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex.”
• When Americans for Truth CEO Peter LaBarbera asked Savage to take down “Santorum.com,” Savage replied, “I’m asking Peter LaBarbera to go f— himself.”

At the Seattle conference, Savage also turned his remarks to the country’s Republicans. He described the Old Testament custom of stoning a girl on her wedding night if she’s discovered not to be a virgin and wondered if the GOP would try to pass a similar law in the U.S.

Savage then announced that he was done “beating up the Bible”, and referred to those that left as “pansy a—es,” and told someone to “tell the guys in the hall they can come back in now.”

Responding to feedback from convention attendees, the organizers issued a statement informing people that they were well aware of the viewpoints Savage has publicly made, saying in part to Fox News, “Yet Savage has appeared regularly in the news media, so we were familiar with his general background and the broad range of viewpoints he has made publicly.”

The closest they appeared to come to an apology for featuring the activist speaker was for them to say, “we wish he had stayed more on target for the audience of teen journalists.”

While the statement addresses peoples concerns about the attendees that were “hurt” by the Savage speech, and assures them that it is never the organizers intent for anyone to be “hurt” by a speaker, it then admonishes the young journalists by reminding them that they should “be able to listen to speech that offends you.”

Anyone wishing to see the video that written about in the above story, click on the link below, and you will be able to see the video.

http://www.wnd.com/2012/04/gay-anti-bully-activist-savages-christians/?cat_orig=us