First? Anyway, this is funny and I get the point, but it does kind of imply that one can not be either L, G, B or T and Christian at the same time. I suspect that's not true.

However, quibbles aside, jolly good, point taken.

@1 - Let's see, if the people who tell Dan that not all Christians are horrible people are NALTs, then surely there must be ALTs. These would be the people who insist that there's no way to be a true Christian without hating gays, and like to make it about religious persecution when someone tells them to shut up with the homophobia. They equate their homophobia with their Christianity, so I think the implication here is entirely appropriate.

I can't wait until the Christians start passing this around as a real story. We'll see this on Snopes soon enough.

Um, was there a hoax in the New York Times Well column?

Frankly, I think that if there WERE a Christian teenager being persecuted for his or her beliefs (and it actually doesn't sound too unlikely, especially if he or she were a fundamentalist) Mr. Savage would not be shy about posting about it here. He has been quite clear that his is against bullying.

The joke aside, I'd love to hear about atheists being more assertive in all walks of life. Religion can obfuscate it's responsibility for the horrors it purposely visits on children in schools, but that won't work on thinking people. And thinking people don't need the crutch of religion or it's lack of personal responsibility.

@4: Indeed, diversity includes sex, race, sexual orientation and identity, political persuasion, and religious persuasion. Bullying against all of these occurs to various degrees, and of course at the top is sexual orientation and race.

Gay Christians are like Black Republicans to me.

I get it, but I don't find it funny.

Augh! Don't scare me like that!!
That really would be sad.

@6 No, nothing is "at the top". All forms of discrimination are equally wrong. Why rank them?

Jesus basically killed himself, right? Because he had his Jesus powers. He could have just smote the Romans and said LOL sukrz. But he let them because he'd been bullied so much I guess.

I just hope no misguided Christianist in high school with a martyr complex decides to manufacture this situation.

I get it, but I also don't find it so funny. Because such things have a way of becoming true... A certain social imbalance, with a certain group having power, or a history, to give them an aura of being better-than-others is often enough to empower bullies to go after the people who belong to other groups.

If this hasn't happened yet, it's because the social power (im)balance still favors Christians over non-Christians (and especially atheists), and straights over gays. But as gays and atheists enter the mainstream and receive more 'social' power, I wouldn't be surprised if such a thing happened. Or do you really think that all gays and atheists are good, reasonable, people endowed with a good amount of empathy even for those people (like Christians, Republicans and conservatives) that they've always seen as their enemies?

And what's worse, when it does happen, I'm sure the conservative media will be all over it. "LGBT Watch" blogs will pop up.

Ah, humans.

I don't think it's supposed to be funny, y'all. Thought provoking, yes, but not funny.

Ankylosaur,

I'm inclined to think that humans will bully those who are different. Follow some of the writers here and regulars and you'll see that the insults fly at anyone different. There are self-proclaimed Christians who insult other self-proclaimed Christians for being pro-LGBT rights. There are self-proclaimed atheists do the same. There are self-proclaimed believers in God who insult organized religion. Anecdotally Slog is indicative
of life, as I have experienced it. Maybe fanatacism to the idea of being correct is the source of our inability to accept differences. Just my $0.02.

@Kim in Portland

I've never commented on this site before, but I had to pipe in to say how awesome your comment is. "Fanatacism to the idea of being correct..." is such a fantastic line. Thank you.

@17, 18: Yeah, good call. I'd add to that list that I see a lot of vehemently anti-religion atheists around who sling some pretty intolerant language whenever they see a chance to do so. I don't think any person is immune to the temptation of claiming that they are Right.

oh, er, rereading your post, I think you did include those on your list already. The derp is mine.

@15 ankylosaur : I happen to have grown up, and to be still living in a society where being non-religious is the norm, and everybody would be seriously weirded out by someone who would bring out the Bible or Holy teachings in a conversation not taking place inside a church. Bedtime prayers for children and blessings of meals ? Doesn't happen here, even in non-atheist households. Maybe in fundies one.

Children who admit to being religious are not bullied here - of course they don't go around the school trying to recruit other kids for their faith, it would be severely frowned upon by the school officials. But queer-looking boys still do get a fair share of taunting, even if they keep to themselves.

Living in a more secular or atheist society than yours doesn't equate a shift in bullying patterns.

"Gay" is still an insult among children over here, no matter how tolerant us parents try to educate them. My kids (the eldest is 12) brought home last year a game where someone puts a hand on your shoulder and starts counting. When you shrug the hand off, let's say at 7, the other tells you "Research has shown that people who shrug off a hand after 7 seconds are 7% gay" meaning it as an insult. I had some serious explaining to do, including providing them with a standard response along the lines of "100% of kids who demean gays are secretely afraid of being gays themselves".

The bright side is that our gay children don't commit suicide, not that I'm aware of - perhaps because there's no religious types heaving godsend shame at them. Perhaps because it gets better in highschool already - bullying is not an accepted behaviour in highschool.

I meant - blessings of meals do not happen in *religious* households (religious enough to go to church once a week, which is pretty religious already, for here).

My mother is deeply religious (church more than once a week, private prayers everyday) and she's never blessed a meal, nor made me do bedtime prayers as a child. She considers one's religion as being no one but one's business.

@21-22 (sissoucat), I wasn't trying to draw a necessary connection between 'frowned-upon' groups like gays and atheists: just as Blacks and women didn't have to (and historically weren't) fair towards each other just because they were also not treated fairly by society as a whole.

I think the main point is: having suffered because of the unfairness of others doesn't guarantee that you are yourself not unfair to others (or won't be if you get a chance).

Which is why I am not surprised at the fact that the non-extremism of your social milieu doesn't lead to more gay-friendliness. I've had the same experience myself.

It seems everybody always agrees there is some group of people that does deserve to be despised and downtrodden.

But note that that wasn't my point. As Kim in Portland (#17 above) mentioned, the point is that apparently it's always possible to become enamored with one's correctness ('fanaticism to the idea of being correct', a quite apt phrase) and full of rage at other people's incorrectness -- enough to start making their lives worse with bullying, for instance.

And that, even if the bullies are somehow objectively correct in their opinions, and the bullied aren't.

Because there apparently always are sufficiently many people who think it's a good idea to show others how wrong they are with a little bullying.

Why that is so -- why some people think bullying those who are wrong (or 'wrong') is a good idea -- is perhaps more important than the actual reason (gayness, blackness, belief in god or lack thereof) given for a specific act of bullying. I wonder if there's someone working on that.

I'm not unwilling to accept that Christian kids might have been bullied for their religion in the U.S., especially if they go to a church that has weird rules about how to dress or physical appearance.

However, the vast majority of times I've heard Christians whine about "anti-Christian bullying" it was really that the other kids were sick of their sanctimonious preachy bullshit and one day decided they'd had enough and called them on it.

It seems like way too many right-wing Christians think "oppression" is when they're not allowed to oppress others. If they're not given special treatment, they're being "discriminated against" - hence the ridiculous fits they throw every time a store wants to put a Hanukkah display next to a Christmas one. This is pretty much the essence of what anti-oppression scholars call "privilege."

"I see a lot of vehemently anti-religion atheists around who sling some pretty intolerant language whenever they see a chance to do so."

No kidding. For a long time I've been willing to give this a pass because, hey, a lot of horrible things are being done around the world and in the U.S. in the name of religion. Bogus religious sentiments dominate the U.S. political landscape in a way they should not. On the other hand, come on, atheists. Your group is bigger than, say, practicing Jewish people in America. Maybe it's time to brush the chip off the shoulder already.