Dan Savage, the homosexual activist responsible for the “It Gets Better“ campaign that targets the supposed bullying of “gay” teens and young adults, has once again been caught inciting audiences with some bullying and hatred of his own. Weeks after prompting a group of students to walk out of a high school journalism conference in Seattle when he denigrated the Bible and Judeo-Christian faith and Scripture with curses and mockery, Savage was caught on video during an April 29 address at Elmhurst College in Illinois playfully suggesting that the Pope is homosexual and charging that children who identify with the homosexual lifestyle are being beaten “because of religion.”
“The Pope recently said that gay marriage is a threat to the survival of the human race, because once gay marriage is legal, everybody’s gonna get married,” LifeSiteNews.com quoted Savage as telling 1,300 students gathered at the school’s Hammerschmidt Chapel. “What the Pope is saying is there is no such thing as a straight person.” He added that “the Pope is projecting in saying nobody’s straight — not the Pope, not anybody else.” Savage’s comments included incredibly obscene sexual comments and more denigration of Christian beliefs, something for which the “anti-bullying” activist is becoming notorious.
LifeSiteNews reported that Savage “claimed the beatings of LGBT minors stemmed from the political, moral, and religious views of their parents. Students ‘watch their parents beat up gay people from afar with their checkbooks and their votes,’ he said. ‘They feel entitled to beat up that gay kid in that school, because the adults in their lives are doing and giving their blessing to it, because of religion.’”
Savage took particular delight in mocking Pope Benedict XVI’s warning in January that the nuclear family “is not a simple social convention, but rather the fundamental cell of every society. Consequently, policies which undermine the family threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself.”
Savage told the crowd, which included high school students, that “university health departments usually bring me in to undo years of abstinence-only education — which I do in two hours.”
All in all, said Peter LaBarbera of the pro-family group Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, “it’s probably the crudest talk they’ve ever had at Hammerschmidt Chapel.” According to LifeSite, the 141-year-old Elmhurst College, affiliated with the United Church of Christ denomination, “ became the first college in the nation to ask whether prospective students consider themselves homosexual or transgender.”
According to CNSNews.com, LaBarbera was present at the Elmhurst event, and was removed from the chapel after he expressed his Christian views and tried to question Savage about his “vile attack” on conservative presidential candidate Rick Santorum. LaBarbera was, however, present long enough to hear a lengthy anti-Christian and needlessly filthy diatribe, which, strangely, has not made it on to video clips used to promote Savage. “He was especially obscene about Family Research Council leader Tony Perkins, declaring everything Perkins does causes gays to commit suicide,” LaBarbera recalled. “He said every dead gay kid is a rhetorical victory for Tony Perkins and Perkins stands on their dead bodies.”
During a recent interview on CNN, Savage rebuked the network for allowing Perkins to voice his group’s pro-family ideals. “There are not two sides to the issues of gay and lesbian rights,” declared Savage, “and right now one side is using dehumanizing rhetoric, and yet the leaders of these groups like Tony Perkins are welcomed on to CNN to espouse hate.”
CNSNews reported that after listening to a number of minutes of Savage’s sophomorically hateful rhetoric against the Pope, Christianity, the Bible, and various respectable conservative Americans, LaBarbera finally weighed in to the fray, confronting the Juvenile behaving Savage “about his malicious attack on conservative presidential candidate Rick Santorum…. LaBarbera said his mic was shut off so the audience could not hear Savage’s appalling definition of Santorum, and Savage vehemently defended his disgusting act. He said he would never take the website down, and hopefully someday the Santorum kids could correct their father. He had absolutely no remorse, only defiance, LaBarbera said about Savage’s response.”
After the verbal exchange, LaBarbera turned to the crowd and explained that contrary to Savage’s assault, Christians are against the bullying of anyone. He said as he returned to his seat, the woman sitting next to him took his belongings and threw them into the aisle. He was then escorted from the chapel for “disruptive behavior.” Recalled LaBarbera: “I was not a heckler and I was not belligerent. I only asked a question and all I wanted to do was hear the rest of the talk.”
As reported by Focus on the Family’s CitizenLink.com, last month Savage hectored a crowd of high school student at a journalism conference inSeattle with the same kind of nasty rhetoric, prompting a group of the students to walk out on his “speech.” While students at the “Journalism on the Edge” conference expected Savage to talk about bullying, instead he hit them with an extended harangue against the Bible’s depiction of homosexuality as sin.
One 17-year-old student who walked out on savage’s screed told CitizenLink: “The first thing he told the audience was, ‘I hope you’re all using birth control!’ ” Then “he said there are people using the Bible as an excuse for gay bullying, because it says in Leviticus and Romans that being gay is wrong. Right after that, he said we can ignore all the ‘B.S.’ in the Bible.”
Recalled the young lady: “I was thinking, ‘This is not going in a good direction at all,’ Then he started going off about the Bible. He said somehow the Bible was pro-slavery. I’m really shy. I’m not really someone to, like, stir up anything. But all of a sudden I just blurted out, ‘That’s bull!’ ” As the group of students walked out, Savage referred to them as “pansies” for their principled stand against his bullying behavior.
CitizenLink noted that the Savage’s recent rhetoric is in keeping with things he has said in the past (found on YouTube), including:
- “Most people that you wind up arguing with about religion and homosexuality have not ever read the Bible without their … moron glasses on.”
- “If you believe it is the divinely inspired word of God, if you believe in the literal truth of the Bible, I challenge you to read the first five [expletive] pages.”
- “We ignore the [expletive] in the Bible about race, about slavery, and we’re going to have to get there for homosexuality.”
Rick Tuttle, a journalism adviser from Northern California’s Sutter Union High School, told Fox News that his students exited Savage’s speech because, while they thought it would be about bullying, “what we got was a vulgar, profanity-laced attack on Christians.”
Tuttle added that it was “my responsibility to protect all students from being bullied … and I inadvertently or unwittingly took them to a place where many were highly offended, to the point where they wanted to leave… So they took a stand, and you know what, this is what we teach kids to do when they’re being bullied — to walk away, and that’s what they did.”
Photo: Dan Savage speaking at Illinois Wesleyan University in 2007.
