Issue of anti-gay bullying comes to the Smithsonian

With good reason, the nation has been focused for several months on horrific stories of anti-gay bullying in American schools. The torment of kids by other kids, sometimes leading to the tragedy of suicide, prompted Congress to hold a briefing on the subject last month. Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) and Rep. Linda Sánchez (D-Calif.), who introduced the Safe Schools Improvement Act, and Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) and Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.), who introduced the Student Non-Discrimination Act, were among those who spoke.

How do kids learn to bully? Emulating their elders is one obvious way. And Washington, alas, is also one prominent platform where adults who should know better engage in the practice.

If you think anti-gay bullying is just about kids, consider events at the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery last week. Read my Critic's Notebook on the subject here.

-- Christopher Knight

twitter.com/KnightLAT

Photos, from top: "Janet Flanner," 1927, photograph by Berenice Abbott; "Painting No. 47, Berlin," 1914-15, oil on canvas by Marsden Hartley.  Credit: Associated Press/National Portrait Gallery

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Comments

[Donald Frazell]

Bullying has been a problem as long as humans have existed, and sadly a horrifically high teenage suicide rate among all ethnicities, sexes and other issues that tend to make individuals stand out as alone and weak. Physical activity and learning to defend oneself are always the best ways to fight it, it gets one respect even if getting an ass wupping. They are young, they will heal, but not if their hormonally ragging emotional issues send them down that horrbile path of self loathing and depression. Even one is to high, but it is a universal problem of all humanity.

And the issue at the Smithsonian has nothing to do with this, it is a rightwing grandstanding about supposed Christian values, though completely at odds with the true teachngs of Yeshua. The homosexual response has been to make it into something more, when even your article has given a littany of reasons why it isnt true, gay rights are stronger than at any point in history. This is political grandstanding by gay activists as much as the right wingers. As usual the truth lies elsewhere and not with the extreme wingnuts of left and right.

[littlebadwolfl]

Religious institutions have taken up the cudgels of bullydom for many thousands of years, and their rigidity makes their idiocy self-perpetuating at the same time that they use it as a screen for the mischief of their leaders.

A careful look at the great religious art of the Renaissance will tell almost any observer that there is high erotic content, and (oy vey) gay content, no matter what the purported subject matter.

It is long overdue for religion to come out of all its many closets and admit that men and women are as they are, monsters at times, but little lower than the (cavorting) angels. Informed understanding and not high dudgeon, might give organized religion a better pulpit. Meanwhile, wrong and unnecessary hate is the result of almost all religious effort.