Conservative groups including the American Family Association, Concerned Women for America and Liberty Counsel are urging parents to keep their children at home on April 11, the annual anti-bullying Day of Silence, in order to avoid exposing them to protests against anti-LGBT bullying.
Mission America’s Linda Harvey and Laurie Higgins of the Illinois Family Institute, an AFA affiliate, discussed the boycott plans on Harvey’s weekend radio show, where Harvey claimed that the Day of Silence actually represents “medical malpractice.”
“This is educational malpractice, it really is, and it really should be medical malpractice,” she said of gay rights advocacy, “especially when you have HIV rates and the other hazards we know that are out there for kids.”
Higgins added that public school educators “censor” anti-gay activists by citing concerns about “safety, or whatever that is,” and said that their curriculum “violates any kind of principles of sound pedagogy.”
Harvey warned that the Day of Silence helps LGBT and allied students feel “empowered in very inappropriate ways,” to intimidate others: “The Day of Silence, the real silencing going on is not the so-called LGBT students, the real silencing going on is conservative and Christian thought.”
“What’s dishonest about this movement is they don’t acknowledge that their end goal is not ending bullying, they’re using that; their end goal is to eradicate conservative moral beliefs or to make it socially, politically impossible to repeat them,” Higgins said. “This is dishonest to say this is just about bullying, this is really and truly about silencing conservatives.”
