In a story on the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow site, Phil Burress of Citizens for Community Values claims that training foster parents in how to care for potentially LGBT children is how “homosexual activists continue to build their numbers”:

Potential foster parents may be required to spend 40 hours in gender sensitivity training, thanks to AB 1865 — a bill that has already passed in the California Assembly. It would require an “administrator of a group home facility, licensed foster parent,” or an “extended family member caregiver” to undergo training to provide care for lesbian, “gay,” bisexual or transgender children. Phil Burress of Citizens for Community Values (CCV) does not think this will actually benefit the children. “It’s going to continue to confuse children,” he asserts. “This is the way the homosexual activists continue to build their numbers — is to get people confused about their gender identity and start acting out.”

It’s always puzzling when people think that children can’t legitimately know whether they’re gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender and any knowledge of these concepts will only “confuse them”, yet accept without question the assumption that all children must be straight and cisgender. This is the result of a mentality that pathologizes sexual diversity and gender variance as somehow being caused by bad influences – it’s beyond their comprehension that this could actually be a natural, normal and acceptable part of who someone is.

Will increased awareness of LGBT identities lead more people to identify as LGBT? Yes, but not because such knowledge causes anyone to become anything they weren’t before. It just means that those who are in a gender/sexual minority will now have the conceptual basis to describe and understand who and what they are, instead of being confused and only knowing that they’re somehow different. That’s not a problem. It’s a solution!

And what’s with the scare quotes around “gay” only? Are the rest of us not important enough to have our identities passive-aggressively questioned? OneNewsNow previously ran into trouble with an automated system to replace the word “gay” with “homosexual”, which resulted in a story about Olympic sprinter “Tyson Homosexual”. I suppose Tyson “Gay” would at least be a step up.