Oh, that Ann Coulter. She's just a fountain of classy humor.
Yesterday, she took to Twitter in response to last Thursday being National Coming Out Day. That really has to get under the skin of people like Coulter, all those gay people making their existence known. So Coulter, the darling of the gay right (GOProud called her "the right-wing Judy Garland"), vented via tweet, declaring that, since gay youth came out last Thursday, yesterday was "national 'disown your son' day."
Get it? Get it?? Because so many LGBT youth are disowned by their families after coming out! Hardy har har har! Isn't that hi-freaking-larious!?
Now, I'm sure Ann Coulter will claim this is just a joke. After all, she has gay friends! This is just a little harmless humor. Kind of like this was just a joke:
If this is Coulter's version of humor, it's beyond sick. I lived my entire childhood in fear of being disowned by my loved ones if anybody found out I was gay. While Coulter is getting her kicks on Twitter by making jokes about LGBT kids getting disowned, 20 percent of the country's 1.6 million homeless youth are LGBT. LGBT kids who, in many cases, were simply thrown out of the house because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Nearly 60 percent of those kids have been sexually victimized. They commit suicide at double the rate of heterosexual homeless youth.
This is the shit Ann Coulter is chuckling it up about on Twitter. Really fucking funny.
GLAAD's Aaron McQuade isn't very amused, either.
I recognize that this is a joke, and that she is not really taken seriously in any context anyway, but with this coming right after National Coming Out Day, at the start of Ally Week and just days before Spirit Day, I thought this would be a good opportunity to talk about this idea of hers. There was a time in our culture's history when, if thousands of LGBT kids were to come out on the same day, the next week genuinely would be exactly what Ann describes, all across the country. Fathers disowning their sons and kicking them out onto the street. Mothers locking up their daughters or sending them to charm school. Children forced to undergo electro-shock or even worse forms of "therapy" to rid themselves of their orientation. To learn how to not be true to themselves.
And although we've come a long way from those ideas as a cultural collective, I have no doubt that last week, more than a few American households experienced the tragedy that Ann joked about. Approximately 50% of LGBT youth experience some degree of family rejection. There are as many as 100 thousand homeless LGBT youth on our nation's streets, and it's estimated that LGBT youth make up as much as 40% of our nation's homeless youth population. LGBT youth who are completely rejected by their parents are more than 8 times as likely to have attempted suicide. Pretty funny, right?
Ann Coulter is just evil, plain and simple. There's no other way to put it.
Now, let's wait with bated breath for GOProud to condemn these comments. Or, more likely, to defend them.
UPDATE: Now that this diary has already seen one hide-rated comment, I would like to say that comments that attack Ann Coulter by implying that she is transgender are completely unacceptable in this diary (or anywhere else, for that matter). Transphobia is not welcome here.