Just when you thought it was safe to come out of the closet...

I would like to dispute a letter printed in last week's issue entitled "A Passion for Destruction." This article was filled with nothing but a bunch of homophobic induced lies and fear. The letter was mainly against one thing - the first amendment! This article claimed that chalking the campus for National Coming Out Day was wrong, unethical and immoral. I, as the secretary of BILAGA would like to state that there was no difference in our chalking than the chalking for any other event that occurs on campus, except for the fact that ours was educational and more colorful. National coming out day is a day meant for support and encouragement, and personally I thought this year;s Coming Out day went very well. We had many people come to our open meeting, and we saw some new faces, gay and straight, come out to support us.

Last week's article also complained about the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network conference in Boston last March. According to the article, the conference "encouraged the students to engage in perverse and physically dangerous acts." I have a very hard time not taking this statement as a homophobic and also hate filled exaggeration. I did not attend this conference, and I did not even know about GLSEN until I read this article. I searched their web site (which I recommend you visit at http://www.GLSEN.org) and could not find anything according to last week's article that was "beyond reprehensible, beyond pornographic, beyond belief and beyond description." In fact, I found many things opposite to that. GLSEN is an organization, whose motto is "Teaching respect for all in our schools." They provide information to help teachers teach about sensitivity towards gay and bisexual students. It is full of thematic units that revolve around important issues, such as a lesson plan based on Matthew Shepard, the boy who was beaten to death over a year ago because he was gay. This lesson plan is geared towards using math, social studies, geography, history, writing skills etc., while teaching about an important issue. I did not find anything pornographic about it. In fact, I think we could use a GLSEN chapter at our college, after reading last week's article.

Last weeks article stated that The Parents Rights Coalition did not like the conference and had a statehouse protest with their key speaker Alan Keyes. Keyes states that people have control over whether they want to love people of the same or opposite gender, and that it is morally wrong to love someone of the same gender. Well, that is a lie. When you fall in love with a person, it's the person himself or herself that you fall in love with, and you have no control over whether or not s/he happens to have a Y chromosome.

In conclusion I am very upset that there are still feelings of hatred at this school towards the gay community, but I am almost thankful for the article that brought my attention to GLSEN, a wonderful organization that I hope to learn even more about. I hope that you do not believe the things in last weeks letter, and I would like to invite everyone, especially last week's author, to the next open BILAGA meeting which will be coming up soon, and there will be lots of chalking on campus about it. Hopefully the upcoming meeting will open your eyes about who we are.