The president of the Minnesota Family Council (MFC), Tom Pritchard (photo), has just released a statement that blames child suicide victims of anti-gay bullying for being bullied to death. That’s right, the MFC is saying that the children who are driven to suicide are to blame for being bullied to death. The Minnesota Independent reports,
The Minnesota Family Council (MFC) is pushing back against efforts to improve the climate for LGBT students in the Anoka-Hennepin School District, where community members are mourning suicides by four LGBT students in the last year. The real issue is “homosexual indoctrination,†not anti-gay bullying, says MFC’s Tom Prichard, who says the students are dead because they adopted an “unhealthy lifestyle.†MFC’s campaign against anti-bullying education comes as national religious right groups mount a similar campaign in the aftermath of nearly half a dozen suicides by LGBT students around the country in the last month.
The Independent quotes Pritchard as saying,
I would agree that youth who embrace homosexuality are at greater risk, because they’ve embraced an unhealthy sexual identity and lifestyle. These alternative sexual identifications or lifestyles deny the reality that we are created male and female. To live or try to live in conflict with how we are made will invariably cause problems, e.g. emotional, psychological and social. Notwithstanding gay activist assertions to the contrary, people aren’t gay, lesbian, transgender, etc. by God’s design or nature. We are male and female with sexual expression designed for a lifelong union between a man and a woman. Denying or fighting against this reality is the reason alternative forms of sexual expression, whether homosexual or heterosexual, will put people at greater risk. To assert otherwise is to deny reality and involves “kicking against the goad†to use a biblical analogy.
Pritchard says, “I’ll of course be accused of being unloving, hateful, etc.”
You don’t know the half of it, Mr. Pritchard.
The Independent, in a story Pritchard links to from the MFC’s blog, finds that forty Minnesota youths under the age of 20 died by suicide last year, and an additional fifty-three people aged twenty to twenty-four died in that state by suicide.
Mr. Pritchard is doing a terrible job protecting Minnesota families. I call upon the citizens of Minnesota to stop donating to the Minnesota Family Council until it embraces people of all family structures and acknowledges that the victims in this terrible story are our children, especially the ones who are literally bullied to death.