Conservative Christian Groups Condemn Highlights Magazine for Treating Gay Couples As Normal December 9, 2016

Conservative Christian Groups Condemn Highlights Magazine for Treating Gay Couples As Normal

Multiple conservative Christian groups are calling for a boycott of Highlights, the magazine for kids, because the editors plan to include gay couples without putting horns on their heads. Or rather, they will feature gay and lesbian couples on their pages the same way they do straight couples. And treating those people as human beings goes against everything these Christian groups stand for.

It’s like they always say: “Love the sinner, hate the sin, and then forget the first thing we said.”

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Groups like One Million Moms (which has 3,556 Twitter followers) and the American Family Association have already launched a petition and are asking their followers to call the magazine’s headquarters to whine about the change.

These are the remarks that set them off:

Highlights‘ Christine Cully said, “When we do show families in the magazines, we make it a point to include diversity. We strive to be diverse in every way. The goal, however, is not to specifically call attention to diversity but instead to help kids understand that while differences exist, we are all actually more alike than different. For instance, from time to time we show families headed up by a grandparent or single parents. We show adoptive families, blended families, multi-generational families, and multi-racial families. In the future, we will depict same-sex families in our magazines in a manner consistent to the way all diverse families are depicted.

The Christian groups want the magazine — and all of society, really — to pretend that gay couples don’t exist. They want to push them back into the closet.

One Million Moms (which has 87,813 Facebook Likes) said “it is not a magazines’ job to introduce so called ‘social issues’ to children. That is a parent’s role.” Showing kids that gay couples exist is not a “social issue.” It’s reality. And while a lot of Christians are bigots who fear the spread of gay cooties, the rest of us who don’t treat homosexuality like a mental disorder aren’t worried about exposing our kids to different kinds of families.

This is what faith-based hatred looks like. This is why Christians so often bully and demonize LGBT people. They’re taught from a young age that gay people are abnormal and need to be saved. The very thought of kids being around gay people scares these Christians, as if their kids would be in some sort of unique danger around LGBT people.

Meanwhile, One Million Moms and AFA have yet to launch a petition condemning Donald Trump on any of the truly awful things he’s said over the past year. Sexual assault, hiring white supremacists, threatening to tear apart Mexican families? Who cares. Treating gay and lesbian couples as normal? EVERYONE SIGN OUR STATEMENT!

This is what Goofus would do.

Highlights isn’t treating gay couples as “special” or better than anyone else. They’re simply acknowledging that not all families look alike, and they don’t think kids should be censored from that knowledge.

I’d love to see decent Christians — the ones who have no problem with homosexuality — speak out against the bigots in their community. Most won’t do it, but it would be nice, wouldn’t it? Choosing silence is cowardly when this moral “dilemma” is so damn simple.

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