man, this thread has got some of you talking real sassy. it's really kinda cute.
i think for the sake of everyone's personal sanity that we should quit using the word "bigot" for the rest of the thread. at this point i cant tell who's a bigot. i've got a turkey sandwich next to me right now and all because of this thread i just want to yell at it and call it a bigot.
as far as the OP is concerned (if anybody remembers what it was about) of course it's harmful to tell someone that a part of them is wrong. black kids are groomed to act more white all the time, smart kids forced to forgo studies in order to keep up in sports, skeptical kids dragged to church on sundays... etc. and yes, when my mother was in catholic school they would beat her knuckles til they bled in order to teach her NOT to be left handed because they viewed her inconsistency as a rebellion from god. ugh. parents are responsible for teaching their children to be themselves and to be comfortable in their own skin, the public is responsible for staying the hell out of parent's business and never telling anybody else's kid that they aren't good enough. and bullies are responsible for making everyone's life worse, because they probably get told they aren't good enough by their own parents. of course it is harmful to teach LGBT kids that they should be something they aren't, but unfortunately it's going to be another decade or so before it's realistic to assume that they will never hear the "god hates queers" message. so we're going to have to be creative in our response to it.
but the entire argument is based on a false dichotomy. this might not be a popular interpretation of the data, but it is consistent with the data; there is no such thing as homosexual or heterosexual. we're all on varying scales of bisexuality. whenever somebody tells me "i like girls", i ask them "all of them?". no matter what your sexual orientation, there are a lot more details that are specifically important when it comes to sexual attraction. someone may have a tendency toward sexual attraction to females, yet they typically only have an attraction to females of a certain age group, with certain similar physical features, with certain emotional tendencies and with certain preferences of their own. there's more to sex than gender. and in all of these categories there are spectral ranges of preferences, they are not black and white. maybe if our kids learned that they aren't really all that different from everyone else just because they happen to fall a few clicks closer to the male attraction than most of their peers, they wouldn't feel alienated.
although this thinking really puts a rock in the shoe of many church groups. if fred phelps found out he was only a few dash-lines on a spectrum from being homosexual he might have a heart attack (what a shame that would be).
understand that i'm not saying that for social reasons "homosexual" and "heterosexual" are not useful terms, but as far as set-in-stone scientific terms, they are just not broad enough to be considered realistic. being proud of who you are and pursuing relationships with those you have attraction for (and, if you so choose, being afforded every legal right to have that union recognized by the state) is very valuable and should be afforded to all people, especially our children as they explore exactly who they are and who they want to be sexually intimate with.
or maybe our ears are just ringing because we've heard the same exact garbage a thousand frakking times and we wish you would just come up with something we haven't heard before so we can stop scratching our eyes out for five seconds.
welcome to the forum!