The Christian Institute is often a force for good in our country but when it gets things wrong boy does it get it wrong! An example is its statement released on May 27th this year where the headline read, ‘US gay blogger: We want to ‘indoctrinate’ children’. The piece goes on to suggest that the ‘homosexual lobby’ wants to indoctrinate children so as to undermine marriage and the heterosexual norm. Big news if it were true.

The context for this paranoia is the big anti-bullying campaign currently on-going in the US where a number of teenagers have committed suicide because of the homophobic bullying they have had to endure. Having an anti-bullying strategy generally is obviously good common sense and there is plenty of evidence to show that the implementation of such strategies does have a positive impact and reduces the amount of bullying that goes on. Taking bullying seriously is surely very important and it’s good to know that in England and Wales having such strategies is a legal requirement in all schools.

Now when homophobic bullying got so nasty that some teens in the US committed suicide it was decided that a particular strategy was needed to combat this kind of bullying. One response was for some pro-gay rights groups to prepare their own literature to distribute in schools. Perhaps inevitably some Christian organisations objected. And it was as a response to this objection that the ‘gay blogger’ in question – one Daniel Villareal – wrote his blog piece. Now while I haven’t found his post in full I have read parts of it as quoted on an US Christian pro-family site and it seems to me that all Villareal is doing is promoting the idea that children should accept that not all people are heterosexual and therefore homosexuals should not be bullied because they’re different to the majority. That’s not quite in line with what the Christian Institute are saying in their comment piece.

But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt for a moment. Maybe Villareal in his piece is advocating the indoctrination of children in the wayChristian Institute claim, but can they really suggest that he speaks for all homosexual people? Is this one blogpost representative of all pro-homosexual groups both in the US and UK? Do they all want nothing more than to infiltrate our children’s schools by ‘adopting anti-bullying campaigns’? What about those gay people who follow Jesus? Are they too in the same camp? Or has the Christian Institute, in trying to stand for Christian morals, adopted the dubious tactics of political spin in tarring all with the same brush?

Getting involved in political lobbying is necessary for the church and as I said above the Christian Institute has a track record of doing a lot of good. But adopting the tactics that have brought shame on our political class is hardly the way to do it, and worse of all in aligning itself against a campaign to stop the bullying that has led some to suicide Christian Institute has fallen well short of its own standards.

Any thoughts?


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