The Huffington Post: Family Research Council President Tony Perkins recently gave an unsympathetic diagnosis for the recent surge in teen suicides caused anti-gay bullying: they resort to extreme measures because they're battling with the internal understanding that homosexuality is, in fact, "abnormal."
Speaking with NPR for a piece about how religious movements fit into the anti-gay bullying equation, Perkins's analysis of the situation appeared the least forgiving.
Perkins told NPR that gay rights groups were exploiting the concern over anti-LGBT bigotry to build momentum for their movement, an argument that he has made before.
"There's no correlation between inacceptance of homosexuality and depression and suicide," Perkins told NPR.
Here's how Perkins explained the issue:
"These young people who identify as gay or lesbian, we know from the social science that they have a higher propensity to depression or suicide because of that internal conflict," he says.
Homosexuality is "abnormal," he says, and kids know it, which leads them to despair. That's why he wants to confront gay activism in public schools. For example, his group supports the Day of Truth, when Christian high-schoolers make their case that homosexuality is a sin.
Tony Perkins was given a platform to make a similarly uncompassionate polemic in the Washington Post earlier this month, on National Coming Out Day, no less. The paper later explained, over Twitter, that the editorial was their attempt to "cover both sides" of the debate.
