Anti-Bullying speaker curses Christian teens

With the note, “Speaking of palpable hatred … “, by which he refers back to his previous extraordinary comment on the increasingly open hatred liberals have for conservatives and their desire to get rid of us, Sam sends this April 27 story from Fox News Radio:

Anti-Bullying Speaker Curses Christian Teens

As many as 100 high school students walked out of a national journalism conference after an anti-bullying speaker began cursing, attacked the Bible and reportedly called those who refused to listen to his rant “pansy assed.”

The speaker was Dan Savage, founder of the “It Gets Better” project, an anti-bullying campaign that has reached more than 40 million viewers with contributors ranging from President Obama to Hollywood stars. Savage also writes a sex advice column called “Savage Love.”

Savage, and his husband, were also guests at the White House for President Obama’s 2011 LGBT Pride Month reception. He was also invited to a White House anti-bullying conference.

Savage was supposed to be delivering a speech about anti-bullying at the National High School Journalism Conference sponsored by the Journalism Education Association and the National Scholastic Press Association. But it turned into an episode of Christian-bashing.

Rick Tuttle, the journalism advisor for Sutter Union High School in California, was among several thousand people in the audience. He said they thouthe speech was one thing—but it turned into something else.

“I thought this would be about anti-bullying,” Tuttle told Fox news. “It turned into a pointed attack on Christian beliefs.”

Tuttle said a number of his students were offended by Savage’s remarks—and some decided to leave the auditorium.

“It became hostile,” he said. “It felt hostile as we were sitting in the audience—especially towards Christians who espouse beliefs that he was literally taking on.”

Tuttle said the speech was laced with vulgarities and “sexual innuendo not appropriate for this age group.” At one point, he said Savage told the teenagers about how good his partner looked in a speedo.

The conservative website CitizenLink was the first to report about the controversy. They interviewed a 17-year-old girl who was one of students who walked out of the auditorium.

“The first thing he told the audience was, ‘I hope you’re all using birth control,’” she told CitizenLink. “he said there are people using the Bible as an excuse for gay bullying, because it says in Leviticus and Romans that being gay is wrong. Right after that, he said we can ignore all the (expletive deleted) in the Bible.”

As the teenagers were walking out, Tuttle said that Savage heckled them and called them pansy-assed.

“You can tell the Bible guys in the hall they can come back now because I’m done beating up the Bible,” Savage said as other students hollered and cheered. “It’s funny as someone who is on the receiving end of beatings that are justified by the Bible how pansy-assed people react when you push back.”

The executive director of the National Scholastic Press Association provided Fox News with joint statement from the Journalism Education Association that was sent to members—after a number of people complained about Savage’s remarks.

“We appreciate the level of thoughtfulness and deliberation regarding Dan Savage’s keynote address,” the NSPA wrote. “some audience members who felt hurt by his words and tone decided to leave in the middle of his speech, and to this, we want to make our point very clear: While as a journalist it’s important to be able to listen to speech that offends you, these students and advisers had simply reached their tolerance level for what they were willing to hear.”

The NSPA said they did not have a prior transcript of Savage’s speech and that wish “he had stayed more on target for the audience of teen journalists.” They also said it provided a “teachable moment” for students.

As for Savage’s attack on people of faith?

“While some of his earlier comments were so strongly worded that they shook some of our audience members, it is never the intent of JEA or NSPA to let students get hurt during their time at our conventions,” they wrote.

However, not once did the NSPA or the JEA offer any apologies to the students or faculty advisors or anyone else in attendance.

Savage did offer a sarcastic apology “if I hurt anyone’s feelings.”

“But I have a right to defend myself and to point out the hypocrisy of people who justify anti-gay bigotry by pointing to the Bible and insisting we must live by the code of Leviticus on this one issue and no other.”

Tuttle said that he “felt duped” by the event. “There were Christian schools who went to the conference. To have this happen was disappointing and shocking.”

The NSPA said they should have done a better job preparing schools for what to expect.

For his part, Tuttle said that he will definitely be more cautious about the speakers at future conventions.Tuttle related how Savage told students that for a number of years he was not allowed in schools. He told the students that because it’s gained national acceptance “he’s reveling in the fact that it’s basically a middle finger to all those teachers and administrators who wouldn’t let him have access to those students before.”

But for some of Tuttle’s students—they felt like the anti-bullying activist was in fact—the bully.

Watch the entire video posted below…

[end of article]

LA writes:

I had heard that the “anti-bullying” campaign was not actually against bullying as such, including the most wide-scale bullying which is of whites by blacks, but against anti-homosexual bullying. Dan Savage makes it clear that that is the case.

- end of initial entry -

N. writes:

One definition of “bullying” is “the act of picking a fight, or otherwise attempting to intimidate, a person or persons who can not fight back.”

By this loose definition, a speaker who unleashes a bigoted, hate filled rant against students who have no way to reply or fight back, is a bully. Dan Savage is clearly an anti-religious bigot, and he chose to “pick a fight” against an audience that he could be confident would not fight back.

Dan Savage is a bully. He is what he claims to oppose.

LA replies:

Yes and no. We need to remember that “anti-bullying” is a typical liberal term, having a formal meaning which naïve conservatives mistakenly take to be its genuine meaning, and a real meaning which is grasped by the liberals themselves. The real meaning of bullying is anything that stands in the way of the homosexualist agenda. Therefore the real meaning of anti-bullying is opposition to anything that stands in the way of the homosexualist agenda. To put it more bluntly, the real meaning of anti-bullying is the demonization, punishment, and bullying of conservatives. So, in terms of the real meaning of anti-bullying, Savage is not doing what he claims to oppose, but is being entirely consistent with his beliefs. He is only being a hypocrite if we naïvely take anti-bullying to mean opposition to bullying as such.

I have frequently spoken of the conservatives’ error of thinking that liberals are being “hypocritical” or are using a “double standard.” This mistaken belief flows from the conservatives’ assumption that liberals share the conservatives’ universalist standard of justice—e.g., that anti-bullying means opposition to bullying as such, bullying committed by anyone, and against anyone. But in terms of liberals’ true beliefs, liberals do not have a double standard of the good, but a single standard: the good is the advance of liberalism, and the destruction of that which stands in the way of liberalism. In other words, liberals, far from sharing the conservatives’ all-American, universal sense of fairness and justice, have a leftist, class-warfare sense of “justice.” Mainstream conservatives are unwilling or unable to recognize this about liberals, because it would mean recognizing that the liberals have no common ground with the conservatives and therefore that the time for ordinary politics has passed. As I wrote recently, mainstream conservatism consists largely in covering up the radical nature of liberalism, because if we cease covering it up, the illusion that we are still living in the America we inherited from the past comes to an end, and, along with it, the basis of mainstream conservatism itself.

LA adds:

I am not saying that we should never call liberals hypocrites and never accuse them of the double standard. It is not always possible or convenient to translate conventional, formal phrases into their real meaning. Sometimes we must simply take conventional (though false) language on its own terms. And in those circumstances it may be appropriate to attack liberals as practitioners of a double standard.

N. replies:

I agree with what you write here and have written in the past regarding the meanings of words, and how liberals hollow out words and insert their own, new, meanings into them. However, in this case, the most obvious line of counterattack is to simply point out that Dan Savage is a bigot and a bully, that he deliberately chooses to bully Christian teenagers because he knows they are soft targets.

If I were to meet him face to face, I would simply say, “You are a bully. You are what you claim to oppose,” and let him scream as he wishes. The easiest way to unmask the left agenda is to hold them to their own standards. Dan Savage says he is opposed to “bullying,” then let us accuse him of being a bully, and see how he defends himself.Holding liberals to their own standards is applying Alinsky’s methods to them, it’s worked well in the past for the left.

Just the simjple question, “Why are you such a bully to Christian teenagers?”, is likely to induce hate-filled bigot like Dan Savage to a tirade of foul invective—thereby revealing exactly what he is.

As is so often the case, VFR sees deeper into these events than any “mainstream” conservative site.

LA replies:

I agree entirely with what you say about how to respond to Savage. I was not suggesting that my analysis should be used in the give and take of debate with liberals. As you say, in immediate, practical circumstances, it is enough to hold liberals to their own stated standards. At the same time, if conservatives are to become truly effective opponents of liberalism, they need to understand that liberals do not share their universalist, nice-guy premises, but have a radically different set of beliefs.

In fact, conservatives’ refusal to recognize that liberals have a belief system that is radically antithetical to their own, is similar to, and emerges from the same source as, conservatives’ refusal to recognize that Muslims have a belief system that is radically antithetical to their own. In both cases, conservatives cannot recognize the truth, because it would mean that conciliation with liberals or with Muslims is not possible.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 28, 2012 02:49 PM | Send