Before I say one more word, I’d like to officially take the pledge found on Dan Savage’s It Gets Better website:
Everyone deserves to be respected for who they are. I pledge to spread this message to my friends, family and neighbors. I’ll speak up against hate and intolerance whenever I see it, at school and at work. I’ll provide hope for lesbian, gay, bi, trans and other bullied teens by letting them know that “It Gets Better.”
Hopefully it counts, even though I’m a conservative.
Right now, at this moment, I should be studying for finals. I should be writing a paper. I should be finishing a research project. I should be finalizing my bar application, or memorizing my commencement speech, or maybe even getting 5 or 6 hours of sleep. Yet here I sit, staring at the walls and listening to this video with a broken heart:
Dan, you talk an awful lot of trash for someone so opposed to intolerance.
On Sunday, Savage made an attempt at apologizing for bullying the children who chose to walk out on his speech. Since he apologized for calling a group of children pansy-asses, I’ve chosen to apologize for a few comments I myself recently made about Savage:
It was wrong for me to post these things, and I apologize for doing it. Had I let it stand, what I said in those posts would have cheapened everything I feel about what happened to the kids Savage targeted with his hateful words.
I’m not here for the “doesn’t Dan Savage advocate against bullying?” attack–Jimmy LaSalvia already hit the nail on the head with GOProud’s response to Savage’s remarks:
Dan Savage should apologize for his comments and should apologize to the high school students in attendance whom he called ‘pansy-asses,’” continued LaSalvia. “It is ironic that someone whose claim to fame is fighting bullying would resort to bullying tactics in attacking high school students who were offended by his outrageous remarks.
No, my real issue with this whole situation is that this man was allowed to address a group of children. This is the same man who cyberbullied Rick Santorum by associating Rick’s last name with “the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.”
The same man who publicly stated that a Green Party candidate for Senate should be “dragged behind a pickup truck until there’s nothing left but the rope.”
The same man who sat down with Bill Maher and made crude comments about Michele Bachmann’s husband:
This man was allowed a bully pulpit to address a room full of impressionable children. This is the outrage. This is the scandal. Who associated with the National Scholastic Press Association and/or the Journalism Education Assocation is responsible for inviting a man who makes a living pontificating on the follies of “the fuckable world” to speak to a captive audience full of high school journalists? We’ve been dealing with Dan Savage’s word vomit for years, now. We’ve known who he is, what he believes, and what he believes is and is not acceptable activism.
Now, thanks to the incompetence at the NSPA and/or JEA, we know a little bit more about Dan Savage. We know that he thinks it’s acceptable to curse at teenagers in a professional setting. We know that he thinks it’s acceptable to selectively interpret and misrepresent the teachings of the Bible (a practice he abhors in Christians) in order to make a shock-point. We know that he thinks it’s acceptable to say things that hurt and humiliate children who love Jesus, and we know that he thinks it’s acceptable to keep verbally flogging those children when his hateful remarks earn him applause.
The pledge I posed at the beginning is a promise:
I will do more than speak up against hate and intolerance–I will fight against it with every fiber of my being.
I will do more than provide hope for lesbian, gay, bi, trans, and other bullied teens–I will joyfully offer love, open arms, and protection from harm.
I will do more than let someone who is suffering emotionally or physically know that it gets better–I will help make it better.
Keeping that promise means sticking up for those kids, and speaking out against Dan Savage–and anyone who breathed an “amen” after hearing what he said, because no one deserves to be humiliated in front of their peers, or made to feel small and stupid and low because of what they believe.
No one.
Not even Dan Savage.
that amy miller 
I actually kind of like Dan Savage. How could you think what he did to Rick Santorum to be anything short of brilliant? If you want “the government out of your bedroom” you should hate the Santorum as much as I do. 🙂
What are you talking about? You’re pro-slander/vile speech for a hilariously stupid reason? Sounds good – if you’re a bigot.
Why hate Santorum? Give me some good reasons. Serious, strong, and well-founded reasons.
It’s becuase he doesn’t focus on what matters. Our country is trillions in debt, congress is passing unconstitutional laws that will wreck our health care system, the economy needs millions of more jobs to fix our unemployment problem, but he would rather talk about gay people and abortions.
I hate Santorum because it would be impossible to fix the REAL problems we’re up against if someone like him kept bring up stupid crap that doesn’t matter.
Who WROTE the only successful welfare reform bill in decades? Santorum.
It does matter – it’s all intertwined. Look at those in poverty, for example. Many Americans who live in poverty (by the way, up 8 million since Obama took office) are in that economic situation because of bad home situations (for example, the blogger Lisa Graas). The divorce rate, as well as parent-less rate, is incredibly high. How can anyone succeed if you don’t have a good family to back you up? How can a society pay off its debts to both other countries as well as those under Social Security and Medicare do so if millions of potential taxpayers have been killed – 44 million since 1973?
He was, I’d say, the best blue-collar representative on economic issues. He comes from a state (and district) ruled by union workers and blue-collar folks, especially Democrats. He knew to compromise with these folks, and he understood the focus needed on manufacturing and other production sectors – energy, for example. His Made in America plan would have worked wonders for the manufacturing industry in our country. He proposed cutting 5 trillion from our debt within 5 years, would have trimmed the budget massively, and would bring us to tax rates of 15 and 28 percent. To say he didn’t focus on the economy was wrong – the media skewed everything he said in order to portray him as someone who was only socially conservative – a false narrative.
He was a better anti-Obamacare candidate than Romney, though Bachmann was stronger on anti-Obamacare points than anyone else.
We still need to, as a country, fix education, healthcare, the divorce rate, illegal immigration, college costs, and a whole host of issues. If we focus only on the economy, we will once again be portrayed as narrow-minded evil folks. The more all-encompassing we are, the better the chances for our knowledge to succeed and make America stronger once again.
do you sleep with the lights on? Do you check under the bed for tsoerrirts? Is Iran the boogieman in your closet? There are plenty of just as crazy nation states with nukes. Iran doesn’t even have one. We have over 9000. The only thing you should be afraid of is your governments increasing rhetoric to start a war with Iran. The U.S. government has an agenda in the middle east, and it sure as hell ain’t looking out for your security.
Fascinating. Dan Savage “cyber-bullied” Rcik Santorum? What would you call what Santorum, Bachmann, Perry and their ilk do? What effect do you think their words have on LGBT children and teens?
Do you think that perhaps that last thing one of those LGBT children, who committed suicide recently saw, was one of their anti-gay rants?
Those poor christians, getting their delicate fists hurt, as LGBT children slam their faces onto them.
Telling these kids that they cannot marry someone of the same sex is horrible? Evil? The majority of our country begs to differ. I have yet to see an “anti-gay” rant from any prominent elected conservative.
yeah, the Christians are never persecuted or publicly humiliated for their beliefs? Why should everyone except those who agree with you be silenced? Typical leftist ideology – silence those who disagree with you.
Check your stats, the majority of the country now supports same-sex marriage; But the issue isn’t marriage. The issue is people like Bachmann, Santorum and Perry saying LGBT people are sick and need to be cured. The issue is them using pseudo-science to make make money and fund their political careers whilst young people are sacrificed in the progress.
Let me tell you something, Kenneth Waishuhn wasn’t bullied, persecuted to the point where he felt worthless enough to kill himself- because he was a Christian. In fact, I still haven’t heard of children being beaten up because they were Christians.
You should be ashamed of yourself, madam.
I followed Santorum’s campaign closely for months on end. Not ONCE did I hear him say that gay folks are sick and need to be cured. Never came out of his mouth. Perry has never said anything similar either.
I can’t speak for Bachmann’s husband, Marcus, but it is a fact that we do not know what causes people to be gay. If someone does think gays can be ‘cured,’ I can assure you that that ideology is not part of the conservative mainstream.
I don’t know about this pseudo-science you talk about, but Santorum nor Perry have ever said anything like that. Neither have mainstream conservatives – again, I don’t know about the Bachmanns, they may be an anomaly.
From Gallup: (http://www.gallup.com/poll/9916/Homosexuality.aspx#5)
Polling consistently shows that at least six out of ten Americans are opposed to the recognition of marriages between homosexuals as legally valid unions, with the same rights as traditional marriages.
If the question is re-phrased to emphasize giving benefits to gay or lesbian partners or couples, but without mentioning marriage, the percentage opposed decreases to the point where sentiment can be characterized as roughly breaking even. In 2001, 45% favored a law that would “allow homosexual couples to legally form civil unions, giving them some of the legal rights of married couples”, while 46% opposed. In May 2002, 46% favored this proposition, while 51% opposed.
In short, a majority of Americans express opposition to the official sanction of gay partnerships by marriage, while opinion is more narrowly divided on the issue of extending marriage rights to gay and lesbian couples if they form a civil union.
——-
I’m not an advocate for bullying of folks just because they’re gay. Any type of bullying can drive someone to suicide – stop putting all the gay kids in a box. The gay people who are bullied only receive awareness because it’s such a hot-button issue for leftists. Most people are bullied for physical traits, not sexuality. I’m in school – you most likely aren’t. I see this firsthand – you most likely do not.
People have been killed for ages – centuries – due to religious beliefs. People have committed suicide for being the “wrong” religion. How about the Sicarii, who killed themselves after defending their outpost on Masada (in israel)? Or how about the thousands of Christian martyrs who killed themselves during Roman rule? Or the thousands of Catholics persecuted in England for decades? Even in the US, Catholics were shunned to Maryland, and anti-Mormon bigotry is still high.
Madam? *headdesk*
So you didn’t hear Santorum compare consensual, adult homosexual relationships to “man on dog sex”?
He compare the rape of an animal by a human being to a consenting sexual relationship between two adults.
Once a majority of Germans supported Adolf Hitler, a majority of Russians supported the Bolsheviks, a majority of Spaniards supported the Generalisimo and a majority of Americans supported slavery. The tyranny of the majority is by all means a flawed argument.
The catholics who were persecuted in England were persecuted by their fellow Christians. The same is true of the protestants in Europe and the UK. I can assure you, they were not persecuted by the gay community.
I recommend you take one big step back and have a good look at yourself, because you should be thoroughly ashamed at what you’re doing.
You Christites must e so incredibly happy that someone FINALLY picked on you! News alert: The bible IS bullshit. Gods don’t exist outside your rabid, fevered brains, and while just yesterday yet another gay bar was burned to the ground, and yet another abortion clinic was torched, and yet another abortion doctor was assassinated, and yet another gay kid was beaten, and yet another law was passed shoving your radical Christofascist agenda down our throats, the mainstream media refuses to report on the ongoing, ceaseless “Christian” attacks on people and things that “christians” hate.
So fine, teach your children to hate lal the things your ahteful god hates, but don’t expect us to stand down. Can’t deal with a little pushback? maybe your faith isn’t as strong as you loudly insist it is.
I once prayed to God, asking Him if I should go back to church. I got a strong feeling that I should start reading the Bible… and so I did. I opened the Bible to a random page and within seconds, I was reading a scripture about how I should treat my slaves. That’s when I knew. I knew that this book was definitely… written by mentally unstable people.