LYNCHBURG, Virginia (LifeSiteNews) – A Virginia school district is getting death threats presumably from irate LGBT “allies” over its decision to forgo a “safe space” grant from an LGBT organization was unfavorably highlighted by The Washington Post.
On November 30, the Post published an article by columnist Petula Dvorak accusing the Lynchburg City School Board of “creat[ing] a blueprint for how to belittle, betray and dismiss kids” when it voted 7-2 to reject a $10,000 grant won by the Gender & Sexuality Alliance of EC Glass High School from the national gay suicide prevention nonprofit It Gets Better Project, to develop a “safe space” for students to go to find comfort and calm from panic attacks, bullying, or other ordeals.
The article says LGBT activist students felt traumatized by the board’s rejection at a recent school board meeting. “They were just stone-faced while we were talking,” EC Glass GSA co-president Chester Lobb said. “It was horrifically rude and made us feel like we weren’t even there.”
ABC affiliate WSET reported that after the Post’s coverage of the meeting, the board started receiving death threats over its decision, which police are investigating.
“I know that these emails are affecting some of the board members to a greater extent than they are affecting other board members, and to that end, we are taking this very seriously,” board member Christian Depaul said.
Depaul faulted the Post piece for not making clear that the district will be adding “safe spaces” to schools but was simply uncomfortable with taking money from It Gets Better specifically. “We want the students to be safe and have a productive learning environment,” Depaul said.
Dvorak’s article contains one line that “Some of the school board members insisted that they wouldn’t take money from this organization” (emphasis in the original), and later a line that “Some board members said they were open to looking for money in the division’s tight budget to create such a space on their own, totally missing the point,” but does not explain how such a room would not accomplish the same purpose.
“There are short videos on the [LGBT] lifestyle [from It Gets Better] that the kids would have to watch,” the Post quotes school board member Letitia Lowery as objecting, which the article says was incorrect: “The grant asks for just one thing — that they identify the sponsors, something that every grant does, one school board member reminded the room. In this case, it would be with one simple phrase anywhere in the space: ‘It Gets Better.’”
While such a requirement does not on its own constitute LGBT indoctrination, it would presumably constitute an endorsement of the sponsoring organization, which in turn would approvingly invite students to peruse far more controversial material with ample grounds for concern.
As LifeSiteNews has previously covered, It Gets Better is the brainchild of gay atheist advice columnist Dan Savage, a man with a long history of “bullying” those who disagree with him. Savage has publicly wished that Republicans were “all f***ing dead,” commonly used crude sexual rhetoric about those who disagree with him on LGBT issues and declared that he sometimes thinks “abortion should be mandatory for about 30 years” to “change the world for the better.”
In 2017, a study published in the Journal of Homosexuality found that It Gets Better’s approach “potentially exacerbates stress” and was actually “associated with more depressive symptoms, less self-esteem and less satisfaction in life.”