While CNN suspends (or fires) its on-air personalities for Twitter horseplay, perhaps they should turn that sensitivity around on the “defamation” police that demand the firings. Dan Savage, promoted as a positive force by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, is quite skilled at defamation. The Dallas Voice supportively reports the latest outburst, from Denton, Texas:
“Every time LGBT bullying kills a kid, Tony Perkins gets up from his desk and dances a jig,” Savage claimed about Family Research Council president during Savage’s keynote speech at the 12th Annual University of North Texas “Equity and Diversity Conference” on Tuesday. “Every LGBT youth suicide for them is a victory, a rhetorical and moral victory,” Savage added.
Savage's last appearance on CNN was last June on the now-defunct Joy Behar show, when he demanded a suspended Southwest Airlines pilot be fired for anti-gay speech. (They really love getting people fired.) Savage was also honored in a year-end “gay rights” review piece on NPR, where he also singled out Perkins: “increasingly, straight people are demonstrating their support in ways that really touch my heart and terrify Tony Perkins.”
Savage is perhaps best known in 2011 for going on Bill Maher's HBO show and proclaiming not only that “I sometimes think about f**king the s**t out of Rick Santorum," but said of Republicans "I wish they were all fucking dead!" (NPR had no questions about that at year's end). But the gay activists (and their media allies) present Savage implausibly as an anti-bullying voice:
“[However, that] does not excuse or preclude us from doing more …” Savage continued, “from confronting bullies, from holding schools and teachers and preachers and parents responsible for what they do or don’t do or fail to do for LGBT kids in pain.”
That’s why Savage’s project has supported Sen. Al Franken’s Student Non-Discrimination Act as well as the efforts of groups like the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, the Trevor Project and the American Civil Liberties Union.
“[The Trevor Project] is there to talk kids off the ledge,” Savage said, “GLSEN is there to make sure there are fewer kids in our schools climbing out onto that ledge and the ACLU is there to sue the crap out of schools that push kids onto that ledge.”
...But instead of letting kids act out the violence of their adult role-models who bash gays at the pulpit and the ballot box, Savage called on school members to actively oppose anti-LGBT bullying and on liberal and more progressive Christians to stop “the complicit silence … aiding them and abetting [the religious right] in their crimes.”
PS: Perhaps a Straight Alliance Against Defamation should give Savage a ticket for tweets like this one:
Label all homo-social contact "gay" and we make straight men crazy and violent. Or crazier and violenter.
