Video: National Organisation for Marriage warns parents to ensure kids don’t have gay friends
In a video uncovered by the lobbying group Think Progress, the US’s National Organisation for Marriage has recommended that parents insist their college age children are careful about befriending LGBT people.
Dr Jennifer Roback Morse of NOM’s Ruth Institute says young people are “pressured” to support equality because they have gay friends or college classmates.
In the video, Dr Morse tells a story of a Catholic resident assistant at a college who didn’t want to take part in a ‘drag party’ organised by a “homosexual male” supervisor. Dr Morse warns that the supervisor was “really leaning on her” and tried to “make her feel bad, make her look bad.”
“I think a lot of our students are encountering this type of situation in their dorms and on their college campuses,” she said. “Somebody’s got to be there talking to young people one at a time in the places where they’re hanging out and doing the things that they’re doing. There’s no mass media strategy by itself that will solve this problem.
“This holiday season, when your young people come home from college, ask them about this. Ask them if they have a gay resident assistants in their dorms. So please, talk to your young people about this and see what kind of pressure they may be under that maybe even they don’t realise how much it’s having an impact upon them.”
Think Progress says: “Morse’s inherent solution seems to be that young people should ostracise (or disobey, in the case of someone in a supervisory position like an resident assistant) anybody who might be openly gay and to only talk to other equally anti-gay people.”
