Author Amber Dee Parker and her teenage illustrator, Hannah Sequra, have put together this horrid collaboration targeting the youngest of generations as a way to keep the misinformation train a'chugging and the discriminatory, judgmental, heterosexist, elitist mindset firmly in place.
God Made Dad and Mom centers (loosely) on a young boy named Michael, a trip to some special kind of zoo where all the animals are heterosexual and mate for life, and Michael's family praying for his poor friend Jimmy who has two dads. Oh, and there's some stuff about "God's plan for a family" in there, which as we all know has been comprised of only one man and only one woman and their biological offspring since the beginning of time. I mean, it's not like we have some ancient book detailing how marriage has evolved over the centu- Oh wait. We do. And it's the same book this author is using to justify her viewpoints on the family...huh. Weird.
Oh, I forgot a major plot point! Okay, so it doesn't really have a cohesive plot. But the book ends with Michael asking if he's adopted, and his parents admitting that he was. Seriously, folks. I could not make this shite up.
Essentially, this is a book encouraging children to discriminate against same-sex couples. Even worse - to treat the children of these couples as something to be pitied, and to pray for the breakup/divorce of their 'pretend family' so everyone can run off and go be part of what someone besides God has deemed is God's plan.
Listen, everyone has an absolute right to their own beliefs. And they further have the right to educate and/or indoctrinate their own children. But this filth? This is taking it way too far. It is openly discriminatory, openly elitist (heterosexual families are the only real families - aren't you glad we aren't those poor gay people?), and openly condescending.
And right there, we have the difference between the gay rights movement and the fundamentalists who oppose them. But before we get more in-depth with that, I want to share another lovely children's book with you. This one is entitled, Chased by an Elephant, and is now available at Walmart stores for public consumption by your child - which really doesn't surprise me, given Walmart's recently rabidly anti-gay politics, led by the nose by the uber-right-wing American Family Association.
In Chased by an Elephant, author Janis Barrett Graham attempts to slay the dragon of teen sexuality - especially teen homosexuality. The book details how you can utilize "counseling, truth, and accepting Jesus" to overcome the Demon of Gayness.
Now, this is the same woman who is married to the president of Standard of Liberty (an LDS-headed anti-gay group), which could explain her making comments like these:
"The number of our young people involved in sexual sins has greatly increased in recent years. Some of the most stalwart-seeming youth find themselves involved in pornography, fornication, promiscuity, homosexuality, and the like."
Um, anyone remember the 20's? The 60's? No? Well then how about this little gem regarding LGBT teen suicides:
"Could it be that there are hidden factors at work that contribute to gay youth suicides? How about encouragement to adopt a popularized but unnatural sexual label? How about addiction to soul-killing same-sex pornography? How about being introduced by adults to behaviors too heinous to mention in polite society? How about being told they are forever homosexual and thinking they will never have a normal family life?”
Yes...yeeeeeees...come to the dark side, Janis. We have cookies...yummy, yummy cookies. But we'll only give them to you if you swear a blood oath to proclaim your unnatural gayness to the world and give your children to Creepy 'Uncle Tickles' Larry.
All joking aside, this is the mess we're up against. This is the mindset we're having to battle day in and day out - that homosexuals are unnatural, homosexuals are child molesters, homosexual families are not 'real' or 'normal' families...it goes on and on.
But I've got news for Ms. Janis - it is because of people like her and her equally horrid husband who continue to spread scientifically disproved misinformation and promote that reparative therapy works if you just believe enough and have enough faith (read: money) that those babies think the only option they have when they can't fix what wasn't broken in the first place is to take their own lives. You make them out to be something to be fixed when it is you who are broken, madam.
Which leads us to the common denominator in these two tomes, and why it struck me suddenly that this is the one thing the public at large has got to open its eyes and see - there is a fundamental difference...an enormous, important difference...in how each side of this LGBT debate functions.
I don't know about you, but I've never seen a children's book (nor any book) out by LGBT activists on why we should feel sorry for those straighties' kids, and how we need to pray for them to loosen the hell up. Nor have I seen anything from our side catering to children, suggesting that all they need to do is pray really, really hard, and they too can be gay and have all the great parties.
Do you know why that is? Why we never see them? Because they don't exist. Anywhere.
The members of the LGBT family are not trying to convince straight people they should be gay, and that the power of prayer can change them over; or teaching their children to feel sorry for those kids who only have one dad or one mom, and to pray for them, that their parents will realize they're living outside God's plan and get a divorce.
Because that's not what we're about. All we want is equality - not domination. We don't want to replace the population of the world with only gay couples. There's plenty of room for all of us at the party, people. Nor do we want to change how heterosexual couples live their lives or force them to be gay because we believe it's a better 'lifestyle'. None of us would dream of putting anyone through all that useless, self-esteem stealing trauma! So why is the other side so hell bent on doing just that to us?
Every single member of our community knows the power and the freedom and the beauty of being your authentic self, which may be why things are so different between the two groups. We're all battle-scarred. We've all had to fight against obstacles that the straight community could never even imagine. We've had to deal with coming out to our parents, our spouses, our friends, our kids' friends' parents, teachers, limo drivers, restauranteurs - every single time you meet someone new, you have to gather as much courage as you can and reveal the most intimate, vulnerable thing about you, over and over and over.
So having been through that, it is unimaginable to us to work against allowing people to be their true selves. On the contrary, we want to encourage it - gay, straight, black, white, purple - it doesn't matter.
We don't need divisive crap like this. We don't need to raise another generation of hatred born in ignorance. There's room for us all at the table of life, and we've already been seated. Now we'll just have a cocktail or two, and wait for the rest of you to come to your senses and join us.
Think for yourself - I'm begging you. Don't just repeat what you heard in church or on television or the radio or whatever talk show. Research, research, research. The majority of those who oppose LGBT rights do not have enough information to make an informed opinion, because they're simply regurgitating what is fed to them.
Feed yourself. Free yourself.
We'll save you a seat.
JBT
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