High School-y Goodness part II

I’m just full of piss and vinegar today, ain’t I? Read the first really excellent commentary on why a segregated school for gay kids is a decent idea. You ought to read this page, down towards the bottom are some excellent letters but this one’s the keeper:

“Mr. Nordlinger: I am gay and only 22 years old, which means it wasn’t too long ago that I was in high school in a small town in Wisconsin. I can tell you with absolute certainty that those few students who were openly gay (I was not one of them, for the record) went through hell day in and day out. They were constantly ridiculed by students AND teachers alike. Comparing the abuse ? verbal, mental, emotional, and sometimes physical ? gay students suffer to the abuse overweight kids suffer is absurd. Both are certainly damaged emotionally, but when a gay kid is constantly picked on for being gay I think it affects him in a way different from an overweight kid. The overweight kid walks away from the experience feeling rejected because of his appearance, but the gay kid walks away from the experience feeling rejected because of who he is. . . .

“Moreover, I think the abuse actually engenders certain political attitudes that conservatives find undesirable. The gay kid who is constantly picked on starts to resent all straight people for the way they’ve made him suffer and he will want nothing more than to reject every aspect of culture that he believes is representative of heterosexuality (fidelity, marriage, abstinence, etc.). I also think it causes him to identify his sexuality as being more central to his being than a gay student who wasn’t picked on does (me, for example). I would think that, as a conservative, you would want to avoid this . . .