“If gay marriage threatens your marriage #LGBT #GLBT” - http://t.co/HGnODvBI

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This video is just crazy talk. Gay rights activist Ray Hill faces off against Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association.

Fischer calls the show product placement, saying, “[A]dvertisers purchase time on television programs because they know that what people see on television influences their behavior and influences their choices. We should not glamorize it [gay relationships] anymore than we would glamorize intravenous drug use.”

He also compares gay sex to being as dangerous as intravenous drug use!! He talks erroneously about HIV, completely ignoring that heterosexual contact has been a driver of HIV for the last ten years.

I also think that they give far too little credit to human agency, and far too much to the power of product placement. Just because I see a product on TV doesn’t mean I mindlessly head to the mall and buy it! People do have brains – even though it’s sometimes hard to believe.

ABC News talked to Dan Gainor, vice president of conservative media watchdog Media Research Center: “This is [creator] Ryan Murphy’s latest depraved initiative to promote his gay agenda. This is clearly Ryan Murphy’s vision of what growing up should be, not most of America’s. It’s a high school most parents would not want to send their kids too.”

(Reuters Health) - Lesbian, gay and bisexual teens are five times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers - but those living in a supportive community might be a little better off, according to a new study.

The findings, published online today in Pediatrics, showed that lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) teens living in counties with a high proportion of gay and lesbian couples, and those who went to schools with gay-straight alliances and anti-discrimination policies, were less likely to attempt suicide than LGB teens living in less accepting environments.

The finding is “a call to action in providing a roadmap for how we can begin to reduce suicide in LGB youth,” Mark Hatzenbuehler, the study’s author from Columbia University in New York, told Reuters Health.

He said that while previous studies have shown that LGB teens are more likely to attempt suicide, those studies haven’t been able to determine why exactly that’s the case.

Hatzenbuehler used data from 3 years of health surveys given to teens in Oregon. The data covered more than 30,000 high school students across the state, all surveyed during 11th grade.

Teens answered questions about depression, alcohol use, and relationships with their peers and family, as well as their sexuality.

To evaluate teens’ social environments, Hatzenbuehler gave each of the 34 counties where survey participants lived a score based on the proportion of same-sex couples living there, the county’s percentage of registered Democrats, and the proportion of schools in the area that had gay-straight alliances and anti-discrimination and anti-bullying policies.

About 1400 — or between 4 and 5 percent — of teens surveyed identified themselves as being gay, lesbian, or bisexual.

Of those students, almost 22 kids out of every hundred said they had attempted suicide in the past year. That compared to about 4 of every hundred teens who identified as straight and said they had attempted suicide.

Suicide attempts were more common in LGB teens who reported being depressed and binge drinking, as well as those who had been victimized by their peers or physically abused by an adult.

But even accounting for all those factors, teens’ social environment made a difference too. Those who lived in counties that scored poorly on measures of social environment were about 20 percent more likely to have attempted suicide than teens from high-scoring social environments.

“That challenges the myth that there’s something inherent to being gay that puts (LGB teens) at risk for suicide attempts,” Hatzenbuehler said.

The findings show that by making a few concrete changes to their policies, schools can improve the community for their LGB students and perhaps cut down on attempted suicides as well, Hatzenbuehler said.

Dr. Ritch Savin-Williams, a psychologist from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, questioned the notion that LGB youth are more likely to attempt suicide at all, and said the issue is more controversial than this study suggests.

He said that while LGB youth report suicide attempts more often than straight youth, their idea of a suicide attempt may be skewed. “We have given them the message that they are suicidal,” Savin-Williams, who wasn’t involved in the study, told Reuters Health.

That’s not to say that life is easy for those teens, Savin-Williams said, and many of their thoughts of suicide might be attributed to LBG youth being victimized or hurt.

And it also doesn’t mean schools shouldn’t be doing everything they can to protect those teens with anti-discrimination policies, he added.

“Every kid has to be protected, every kid has to be safe, and it’s the school’s responsibility to do that,” Savin-Williams said. But rather than highlight suicide risks, he said, “my approach would be: look what kind of abilities you’re squashing by not having protection of gay kids. I think that’s a real loss.”

Recently, some high schools and districts have faced legal trouble surrounding bans on gay-straight alliances, including schools in Corpus Christi, Texas last month.

“If schools want to take seriously reducing suicide attempts among LGB youth, several things they can do are allowing gay-straight alliances, implementing anti-discrimination policies and implementing anti-bulling policies,” Hatzenbuehler concluded. “We can reduce suicide attempts in LGB youth by improving the social environment.”

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This year’s National Day of Silence, a project of GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, will be held on April 15. As they put it on the project site:

On the National Day of Silence hundreds of thousands of students nationwide take a vow of silence to bring attention to anti-LGBT name-calling, bullying and harassment in their schools.

“The whole idea is to help embolden and encourage students to want to express their biblical viewpoint in a loving and grace-filled way, especially when controversial sexual topics are brought up in their school and they feel like maybe their viewpoint is being stifled.”

“So this just gives them some tools for being able to be confident and loving [sic] in expressing their biblical viewpoint. The whole idea of silence seems more like a media opportunity—but the idea of dialogue is that this is an actual learning opportunity for students and a free exchange of ideas among them.”

Yes, i was there! 2nd photo compliments of my BFF and her mad camera phone skills!