The Fellowship of Christian Athletes is a national network of summer camps and school clubs that the Religious Right uses as a vehicle to put prayer in public schools. My high school had one. Rest assured, they never played soccer.

Instead, they prayed. Hard. My junior year, when our Gay-Straight Alliance participated in the national Day of Silence, an event that highlights and condemns decades of anti-gay bullying and intimidation, the FCA prayed not just for my high school’s gay students, but for all straight allies participating in the event. Through our status as allies, we were just as sinful as the gay students themselves.

That was April of 2008. George Bush was President; national support for marriage equality stood at 40 percent, with 56 percent opposed; and no one in the conservative movement took seriously the idea that only a few short years later it would be socially unacceptable to openly bully someone — in high school or in the real world — on the basis of their sexual orientation. They felt that the Day of Silence was unfortunate, but that God — and society — would judge its participants appropriately.

Since then, as the LGBT movement has made steady advances in the fight for equality, the conservative movement has lashed out. They have — with varying degrees of consciousness — correctly perceived that they don’t run the show anymore, but have misinterpreted this fact not as a leveling of the playing field, but as a form of marginalization in their own right. They can’t pick on gay people without people speaking out against them anymore, and they’ve taken it to mean that the world is out to get them. Because, apparently, someone always has to be in charge.

So while victories over “religious freedom” bills and an impending Supreme Court affirmation of marriage equality, etc. represent two steps forward, events like McGuffey High School’s “Anti-Gay Day” represent one step back.

Unlike my high school’s FCA, which limited their response to benign (if misguided and insulting) prayer, a group of students at the Pittsburgh-area high school organized a full-blown protest of the school’s Day of Silence observance on Thursday. About 50 flannel-clad high schoolers wrote “anti-gay” on their hands, put Bible verses in homosexual students’ lockers, physically and verbally intimidated classmates and even circulated a “lynch list” of students who had participated in the Day of Silence. One teacher found a noose was tied to a flag in their classroom. The students also shamed gay classmates by posting Bible verses to Instagram and tagging them.

As McGuffey junior Zoe Johnson told Buzzfeed, “I got called a dyke, a faggot…They were calling us every horrible name you can think of.”

The flannel outfits were the first in what was supposed to be a series of clothing-inspired anti-gay events:

While anti-gay bullying of this scale is nothing new, I think there’s something significant in the way in which this episode played out that makes it fundamentally different from how it would have seven years ago.

Rather than letting their bullying take place in one-off incidents, carried out by individuals or small groups, the students at McGuffey felt the need to organize a school-wide anti-gay event. This wasn’t a group of buddies picking on one kid; this was a counter-protest organized around Christian conservatism. Rather than disorganized hate for hate’s sake, it was hate multiplied by identity. That made for an amplified, more offensive episode, but it required a shift away from the assumption that the rest of the school “got it.” In grouping themselves, the participants in Anti-Gay Day set themselves apart from the rest of the school, staking out their claim as an interest group rather than a part of the accepted cultural norm.

In this sense, the outburst of hate at McGuffey High is a representation of the broader conservative movement we see today. We are losing ground, they say, and we need to fight back. High schoolers that they may be, these students listen to their parents, who listen to their socially conservative thought leaders at the pulpit and on the air. I can guarantee you that at some point during the Anti-Gay Day’s planning and execution, the event was justified by its organizers along the lines of “they get their event, so we get one, too.” It’s like similar calls for White History Month, but with more tangible expressions of bigotry.

As painful as it may be, this is a sign of progress. As I wrote during the fracas over Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act:

That religious conservatives are all of a sudden discovering the language of identity politics — seeking to carve out protected status of their own as their cultural hegemony erodes — is only further indication that this battle of the American culture wars is ending, and they’re losing.

The very fact that these students felt the need to organize a hateful event is a sign that the students involved feel, in some sense, insecure in Christian conservatism’s dominance of even a small-town high school in Western Pennsylvania.

There’s a reason that stories like these are being reported by mainstream national outlets like Buzzfeed and Slate. There’s a reason why I heard about this story not because I got an email tip from a reader, but because it was trending on Facebook. To an increasing degree, anti-gay bullying — both in schools and in our wider culture — is becoming unacceptable, and LGBT citizens and allies are speaking out.

To be sure, we aren’t there yet. It has to get better. It will get better. It’s getting better. And the dynamics surrounding Anti-Gay Day at McGuffey High are an indication, however hateful and painful, that the dynamic is shifting in our favor.