There has been a lot of discussion of late about gay bullying. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few months, you’ll be aware of the string of teen suicides resulting from these teens being bullied because they were gay. Everyone and their dog can agree that these deaths are nothing short of tragic. I think it’s a great thing that there has been so much attention directed to this issue and campaigns like the “It Gets Better Project” can only help to make things better.

One of the biggest questions that I’ve heard tossed around is, “Where are the parents?” Where are the parents of the kids who are doing the bullying? This is a great question, but one that is always delivered rhetorically. But it seems to me that there is a very simple answer. The answer is that the parents are leading the way. We are all leading the way.

When we as a society so blatantly bully a group of people, how can we expect our children to do anything different? Don’t agree? Think about it. When we legislate a law that says Homosexual couples do not deserve the right to get married, that is bullying. When we legislate a law that says homosexuals do not have the right to serve openly in the military, that is bullying. Anytime we use power to disallow some people from enjoying the rights that other people enjoy, that is bullying. By denying these rights, we are saying, in no uncertain terms, that these people are different than us and are less than us.

This is the message that we are sending our children. We may also be telling them in words that it’s not right to bully someone, but that message falls short of a system that explicitly and consistently bullies. Now, our children and teenagers don’t have access to legislature that can systematically bully a group of people, but they do have facebook. They do have their school hallways. Just because their venue is different doesn’t mean their behaviour is.

Until we as adults, as a society, stop bullying the LGBT community, to expect our youth to do any different is nothing short of ignorant.

M@