UNITED STATES
The Stranger – Slog
by Dan Savage • Apr 29, 2016
Youth Pastor Watch was a regular feature on Slog for years.
I started doing weekly YPW posts during the long-but-way-shorter-than-we-thought-it-would-be fight for marriage equality. Religious bigots were running all over the country claiming we had to protect the children from married same-sex couples because married gay couples would want to have kids and won’t someone please think of the children! These same religious bigots didn’t seem interested in protecting kids from the sexual predators in their own churches. They didn’t want to have a conversation about who was actually preying on vulnerable kids. They didn’t want anyone thinking about that. Et voilà, Youth Pastor Watch!
I didn’t stop doing Youth Pastor Watch because youth pastors weren’t raping kids anymore—and regular pastors too—but because religious bigots stopped emphasizing the “protect the children” argument. There were just too many gay parents already out there—some parenting the friends of President Obama’s daughters—and there was just too much evidence showing gay parents were as good as straight parents. So the bigots de-emphasized “protect the children!” and switched to the argument they would take all the way to the Supreme Court: straight people suck. That argument didn’t go over well. (As I predicted it wouldn’t.)
But “protect the children” is back.
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