Lawmaker: Hold Schools Teaching Gay is OK Liable for STDs

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A Michigan lawmaker who co-authored the state’s gay marriage ban thinks that if school officials teach students it’s OK to be gay, they should be held financially and criminally liable if the student contracts a sexually transmitted disease.

State Rep. Gary Glenn, R-Midland, made the comments in a 30-minute film titled “Light Wins: How to Overcome the Criminalization of Christianity,” the website Right Wing Watch reported. The comments were made in 2013, before Glenn was elected to the Michigan Legislature in 2014.

“If some young person hears at school that it’s OK to be gay and then comes down with a fatal disease as a result,” Glenn said, “school officials should be held legally liable, individually and in their official capacities, financially and maybe even criminal.”

Glenn, who also serves as president of the American Family Association of Michigan, told MLive.com that he was speaking about “legal theory,” but doesn’t plan to introduce legislation that would hold school officials liable. Even without a legal statute, Glenn thinks school districts could be held liable in lawsuits.

“If the school environment is teaching children that homosexual behavior is normal and healthy, and children, in reliance on what they’re taught from authority figures, decide to experiment or engage in such behavior and suffer negative health consequences, somebody ought to be held accountable,” Glenn told MLive.

Glenn also said in his interview with MLive.com that he is “old fashioned” and doesn’t think schools should teach LGBT students about safe-sex practices that could lessen the risks of contracting STDs. That responsibility rests with their families, he said.

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Yvonne Sifred, the victim services director for the state LGBT advocacy group Equality Michigan, told MLive that Glenn’s comments “would be laughable if they weren’t hyperbolic and so very dangerous.”

Sifred noted high suicide rates among young gay people when they hear similar messages, and said that “teaching love and acceptance is more fruitful than pandering to fear.”

GOP Candidate Huckabee Also Featured

The 2004 voter-approved same-sex marriage ban that Glenn and others successfully backed is currently on appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court, which is on the verge of a ruling that could legalize gay marriage in all 50 states. The ruling on marriage bans in Michigan and three other states – Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee – and is expected to come in the several days before the court adjourns its current term.

The trailer of the film, available for download for a charge, also features Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee, who says Christians need to “show up” for the fight for religious liberty.

“Sometimes, Christians lose the battle because they don’t show up,” said Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor. “I don’t say we need to be mean about it, but we have got to be clear about it.”

With the Supreme Court ruling just days away, Huckabee called on other GOP presidential candidates “to join me in this fight to defend the Constitution” in a June 18 letter to religious freedom activists.

“If you lack the backbone to reject judicial tyranny and fight for religious liberty, you have no business serving our nation as President of the United States,” Huckabee wrote.

Huckabee said he refuses to “sit silently as politically driven interests groups threaten the foundation of religious liberty, criminalize Christianity, and demand that Americans abandon Biblical principles of natural marriage.”

Below, watch the clip from the film that includes Glenn’s comments, via YouTube

(Photo by Ben McCleod via Flickr/Creative Commons)