It’s a matter of your priorities and your scale of values. The important thing is that the [sic] homosexual lifestyle should not be “affirmed”, and all other considerations must be subordinated to that goal.

As long as you fix your sights on that, then if it involves such undesirable effects as increased suicide and use of drugs among GLB youth, well, what the hell? Surely it’s a price well worth paying – especially if it’s OTHER people’s children who are being harmed?

outcomes attributed to rejecting parents could have been affected by bullying as well

Alternatively Jim, the results of peer-group bullying could well be more damaging in a home with rejecting parents; particularly if it’s anti-gay bullying.

Rather than unrelated, a lack of parental support and empathy for a bullied child and the bullying itself could have the same root cause. The two need not be separated, because they are the same: peers who bully at school, and parents who bully at home.

“Maybe if you weren’t so (fill in ending)” is something we could all well imagine a rejecting parent saying, if in fact the child even felt they could approach the parent in the first place.

What I’d love to see from such research, apart from more, is for someone to compare, say, the outcomes with young people subjected to racist bullying (who presumably would find both empathy and practical support at home from parents who have experienced the same taunts). That would help illuminate the contribution from the rejecting home environment.

The only reason why people assume this is an acquired taste, rather than inherent is because there is no safe time for children to express their feelings or reveal them.
So by the time the person IS an adult it seems as if this is as much a decision as what college to attend or whether they like wine or beer.

Even this study being so limited is a sad commentary on how much the public can choose regarding WHAT they are educated on.

Schools are already under siege if they try to teach on the reality of homosexuality and gay lives.
And if a teaching institution can’t teach about it, then what can be done?

Just as it’s mandatory and against the law to keep a child FROM being educated, then why are adults given a pass on being educated about THIS subject that is so fundamentally important?

Would they prefer that the inevitable encounters between gay and straight people end in someone being hurt?
Such as in the case of Lawrence King?
A suicide?

I was walking by the books on the shelves at Target, and usually most of the book stores I go to have all manner of books on parenting. What to expect when you’re pregnant, have an infant and so on.

What to do if you’re child is gay and the likelihood shouldn’t be such a fearsome prospect.

Education.
Why is it SO rejected?

I can’t imagine the stress of a 15 year old to come out to family members under uncertain conditions of acceptance. These kids can and do end up on the streets when angry parents throw them out. Since the average age of kids coming out to family was 15 to 16 years old, I wonder how much of their stress was related to their financial and social vulnerability at that age.

The few times this issue has come up for me, I have encouraged the teen to wait until they were either perfectly capable of taking care of themselves (an adult with a job) or they were certain that they would not be rejected.

I realize that some kids are so stereotypically gay that the issue comes to a head long before the kid wants it to, but in cases where the kid has some level of control, I would strongly advise protecting oneself as much as possible. This world can be very unkind.

“I have made the statement that, you know, we love our kids, we love our family members and friends who struggle with this issue. But…rather than having someone impose [the idea that they were] born that way, cannot change, and denying them any rights — they have a right to know ex-gays exist [and that] change is possible,” she shares. “There is absolutely no science out there that says you are born gay. There’s no gay gene; there’s no [gay] DNA. It is merely self-affirmation.”

Now to me that sounds like the moral equivalent of a parent telling the social worker, “Course I love my children. And it don’t hurt ‘em none to beat ‘em a little. It’s good fer a kid to get a black eye or a bruise of two. It toughens ‘em up.”

Neither Regina nor any other form of abusive parent ever wants to hear that they are hurting their children. They’d rather pat themselves on the back for “standing up for what’s right”.