It’s LGBT pride month, so everyone is going to tell me that I have to affirm LGBT doctrines and lifestyles, or else! So, instead of doing that, let’s look at some evidence about these topics. Did you know how the secular left looks at the poor mental health of LGBT youth, and asserts (without evidence) that more acceptance would make those outcomes better? Turns out the exact opposite is true.
Here’s the left-wing extremist New York Times, dated June 3rd, 2023:
For L.G.B.T.Q. teenagers, high school is a much more accepting place than even a decade ago. They change their pronouns, go to school dances with people of the same gender, and are more likely than any previous generation to openly identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or otherwise queer.
[…]Yet there is a darker side. Even as they are increasingly welcomed by peers, their mental health is significantly worse than that of heterosexual young people.
[…]Their experiences highlight a “paradoxical finding,” as researchers have described it: Even as social inclusion for young L.G.B.T.Q. people has grown, large health disparities between them and their non-L.G.B.T.Q. peers have not shrunk.
The article talks about the strongest reasons why young people embrace LGBT:
- there are pro-LGBT TV shows, movies, music.
- famous pro athletes identify as LGBT
- the Supreme Court overturned legislation passed by elected legislators
- “everyone knows someone who is LGBT”
- social media supports LGBT
- big corporations support LGBT
Growing up in the situation I was in – poverty, different skin color, two working parents, public schools run by secular leftists – I wasn’t much interested in feeling good in the moment. I wanted an accurate view of the battlefield so I could make good decisions, and get out of the mess I was born into. I read the Bible, Shakespeare and my parents’ textbooks from their night classes at the local universities.
My approach was very different from the secular left. They don’t care about truth, or making good decisions to get good results. They care about living in the moment. They want to give in to their desires now, and point fingers later. They want to borrow money and run up expenses now, and pass the bill to someone else later. They are reckless and irresponsible. And they feel entitled to the life outcomes of those detestable Christians later. But they can’t be bothered to behave like those detestable Christians right now.
People who are LGBT are facing little to no disagreement or disapproval:
A recent survey by The New York Times and Morning Consult of 1,574 young adults found that people ages 18 to 28 — who mostly graduated from high school since 2013 — were significantly more likely to know L.G.B.T.Q. students in school than those a decade older, who were teenagers in the 2000s.
The younger group was twice as likely to report knowing at least one transgender student, and three times as likely to have known three or more. Four in 10 said they knew numerous gay, lesbian or bisexual people in high school, compared with a quarter of the older group.
And while both groups reported hearing the words “gay” and “queer” used negatively at similar rates — a data point reflected in interviews with teenagers, who say they still hear “that’s so gay” in school hallways — the younger graduates were significantly more likely to hear those words used in a positive light, too. They were also more likely to have a gay-straight alliance or similar club at their school.
This reflects other data that has found that verbal harassment of L.G.B.T.Q. teenagers declined during the 2010s, while support for same-sex marriage became the norm among young people.
And finally:
“You’re at the point among young adults where almost all these measures of acceptance are in the high 80s, low 90s,” said Jeff Jones, a senior editor who oversees research at Gallup. “It’s basically getting toward a consensus.”
Sounds wonderful for the secular left. They got the morality of the Bible removed from society. Young people today don’t even know what the Bible teaches are dating, relationships, marriage, sexuality, etc. All they know is TV shows, celebrities, entertainers, athletes, and what their public school teachers tell them.
Just one little problem. Secular leftists don’t get to determine what is objectively right and wrong. In a God-designed universe, God decides what works, and what doesn’t work. And no amount of community, peer-approval, propaganda, etc. is going to overrule God’s design for his creatures.
More:
As acceptance has grown, though, the mental health of queer youth has continued to suffer. Reported rates of mental health problems among all young people have been rising for the last decade, but non-heterosexual students face far higher rates than straight students.
About 70 percent of high school students who identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual reported persistent sadness, according to recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, twice the rate of their heterosexual peers. One in five attempted suicide in the past year, nearly four times the rate of straight young people. (The C.D.C. does not track the mental health of transgender youth, but other data shows that roughly half had considered suicide in the past year.)
The New York Times tries to blame these numbers on being in a minority group. But Bible-believing Christians who embrace chastity, marriage, parenting and homeschooling are also a “minority group”. We don’t run the show any more. In fact, we’re the only minority that is still able to be targeted for ridicule and persecution, even by the police and government. But we also don’t have mental illnesses like the poor young people who believed the lies of the secular left, either. I wonder why that is. Could it be that chastity, marriage, parenting and homeschooling are morally right, whether anyone thinks it is or not? Could it be that these activities are self-evidently moral, and therefore just doing them makes the approval and celebration of other people completely unnecessary? For some behaviors, having an audience of One is enough.
