Friday Is the National Day of Silence

This Friday, the 25th, will be the National Day of Silence. People who choose to participate in this event can download a pdf file to print and cut down to make a card which reads:

Silent for Lawrence King

Please understand my reasons for not speaking today. I am participating in the Day of Silence (DOS), a national youth movement bringing attention to the silence faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and their allies. My deliberate silence echoes that silence, which is caused by anti-LGBT bullying, name-calling and harassment. This year’s DOS is held in memory of Lawrence King, a 15 year-old student who was killed in school because of his sexual orientation and gender expression. I believe that ending the silence is the first step toward building awareness and making a commitment to address these injustices. Think about the voices you are not hearing today.

DAY of SILENCE

What are you going to do to end the Silence?

Download that document HERE for a nice-looking printed card.

It's just a little thing, one day of being quiet. It can't hurt anybody, being quiet, but it can be dramatic.

The website DayOfSilence.org has a page of explanation. I'm cutting out the in-between stuff, but they make these four major points:

1) The Day of Silence’s purpose is to bring attention to anti-LGBT name-calling, bullying and harassment and effective responses.

2) Hundreds of thousands of students of all beliefs, backgrounds and sexual orientations participate in the Day of Silence.

3) Day of Silence participants encourage schools to implement proven solutions to address anti-LGBT name-calling, bullying and harassment.

4) The day is a positive educational experience.

Not surprisingly, the Agents of Darkness try to exert their forces against this sort of peaceful, positive activity. The Alliance Defense Fund, which is an organization that has joined local agitators in trying to re-legalize discrimination against transgender people in Montgomery County, has a web site for what they call the "Day of Truth," which will be Monday. I don't know what they plan to do, talk I guess. You can buy t-shirts and posters from them.

Isn't it interesting how "those people" use the word truth? I think most of us would consider a truth to be either a proposition about something that has been observed directly or something that has been proven logically. Yet for the ADF-type folks "truth" is an assertion without evidence or support, something you believe on faith. The absence of evidence can even be twisted around to be a kind of proof of this kind of truth -- it is only through faith that you can know truth, you don't find it in material things. For them, a day of "truth" is a day to say bad things about gay people, because they believe there is something wrong with homosexuality, without evidence or logical support; they believe it on faith, therefore it is truth.

Until a few years ago I was one of those people who never gave a thought to issues facing sexual minorities. GLBT, or LGBT, was not an acronym I recognized, it seemed like gay people did a lot of squawking, and I ignored the whole can of worms. But in 2004 a group of radicals tried to remove our county's school board from office, basing their attack on an anti-gay propaganda platform. The schools had just adopted a new sex-ed curriculum that talked about sexual orientation, and these people were going to use that fact to recall the school board and replace it with a panel of nuts like themselves. Some of us were alarmed at this development, and at least for me it was an eye-opener, because in order to fight them I had to listen to their case and examine the evidence for and against it. Their agenda was incredibly ignorant and hateful, every fact was a lie and every conclusion was decided before the logical argument was developed. They opposed gay people and that was that, anything that gave gay folks an equal chance was "pro-homosexual" (to use Peter Sprigg's tired cliche). I had thought gay people were squawking about nothing, because I figured everybody was like me, more or less apathetic about the whole thing, but it turned out there are people -- we heard a politician say this a month or two ago -- who think gay people are worse than terrorists. These idiots make life miserable for some who just want to live and love in peace, and so they have to fight -- they have to squawk -- just to be treated like anybody else.

Even though the school district ended up putting a curriculum into place that talked about sexual orientation, the final product was barely sufficient to introduce the topic, teachers have to read the classes from a script, and the schools still send home anti-gay materials in students' backpacks. It was considered a gigantic breakthrough to allow teachers to tell their classes that homosexuality is not a disease. The new curriculum is an important step forward, but the silence surrounding the topics of sexual orientation and gender identity is enormous, and the Day of Silence is an excellent dramatization of that fact.

If you have a kid in school, the National Day of Silence should be a good opportunity to talk to them about these issues. Print out that card for them. The big point is that gay and transgender people are just people, they deserve the same respect as everyone else. This can be a growing experience for you and your child, and a chance for them to set an example for others.