One of the worst things about the anti-gay movement is the sexualizing of human beings, and especially of children. Heterosexuality is accepted as the norm, homosexuality as a sexual perversion. The "sexual" in "homosexual" is emphasized, understood as activity, whereas in "heterosexual" it's the "hetero" that is emphasized and the "sexual" is waived.
Heterosexual children are not viewed by default as sexual beings.When a person, or a child, comes out as homosexual they are automatically categorized, by those infected with anti-gay thought, as a person characterized by sexual activity. They are viewed in a lascivious light, as might someone working as a pole dancer or Catholic priest.
This is especially harmful with children.
Viewing an LGBT child as someone who has crossed over into imagined sexual activity allows some adults to withdraw their respect and protection from that child. This is something I have become acutely aware of as my own 13-year-old son has come out at his middle school.
Many well meaning adults charged with my child's protection look at me through a fog of incomprehension, not understanding why they cannot allow children to be called "faggot" in their classroom, or why they have to report each and every incidence of violence.
It's as if they were saying to me, "But your child is gay!"My son does not have a boyfriend, nor does he want one. He is not there yet. He is a child. He understands that his desire is for his own gender, just as some little girls understand that when they grow up they want to marry someone just like daddy. Coming out as gay, for my son, was not an invitation to be treated like someone "asking for it".
The religious right and social conservatives are making a grave error that may cause the marginalization of their organizations for decades to come. Stripped of their political power and moral authority, all that's left, all the world sees, is the perversion of their ideas - LGBT children as sexualized beings rather than human beings, and the smallness, meanness and cruelty that they preach.
Viewing LGBT children as sexualized beings instead of human beings requires the willing (though perhaps unconcious) act of recategorizing a human being, or human child, as a sexual object. This places the child at risk of being abused by other children and adults for whom the usual social boundaries no longer apply.
If we are talking about sin, recategorizing a human child as a sexual object is a SIN.
