Jon Tevlin of the Star Tribune tells us about an attempt by the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis to rally young people around ātraditional marriageā as a political cause.
Iām not sure what the archdiocese expected to happen at this mandatory assembly for seniors at DeLaSalle high school, but Iām sure they didnāt expect anything as awesome as what did happen.
āDeLaSalle kids have a few words with archdiocese at marriage talk,ā Tevlin reports:
āThe first three-quarters of the presentation were really good,ā said [senior Matt] Bliss. āThey talked about what is marriage and how marriage helps us as a society. Then it started going downhill when they started talking about single parents and adopted kids. They didnāt directly say it, but they implied that kids who are adopted or live with single parents are less than kids with two parents of the opposite sex. They implied that a ānormalā family is the best family.ā
āWhen they finally got to gay marriage, [students] were really upset,ā said Bliss. āYou could look around the room and feel the anger. My friend who is a lesbian started crying, and people were crying in the bathroom.ā
Bliss was one of several students who stood up to argue with the representatives from the archdiocese. One girl held up a sign that said, āI love my moms.ā
Itās not just that the students argued with the priest and the married couple there representing the archdiocese ā itās that the students won the argument.
And best of all ā my favorite thing about this story ā is that these kids had each othersā backs. The adopted kids stuck up for the LGBT kids. The LGBT kids stuck up for the kids from single-parent families. And the few kids whose families fit the archdiocesan emissariesā definition of normal and normative stuck up for their friends in the āabnormalā majority.
āPeople were upset,ā said student Lydia Hannah, āand we werenāt just going to sit there.ā
And they didnāt. Good for them.
āI donāt think they expected the response they got from the students,ā Matt Bliss said.
They were so upset that the priest and school officials abruptly ended the assembly. Students who were angry were allowed to stay there and talk with the archdiocese volunteers. It was more civil, for a while, but the more questions the presenters tried to answer, the worse it got.
āIt was a really awful ending,ā said Bliss. āIt was anger, anger, anger, and then we were done and they left. This is really a bad idea.ā