During a recent interview on Liberty Counsel’s “Liberty Pastors” show, the hate-group’s president Mat Staver explained that Christian schools should ban children with gay parents.

Why go after the kids? Because exposing other students to well-adjusted and kind classmates with gay parents might lead students to think gay people are well-adjusted and kind… and that would be a disaster for the Christian Right.

“If I were running the school, I would not allow that student to come into the school that is from a same-sex household, and I would not allow a student to stay there,” Staver said. “You and I might be able to engage in this cultural war and battle and be biblically grounded, but these kids are not prepared for that. It is a real disservice to put these kids in the situation—particularly in a Christian school that ought to be a safe environment for them—where they can become very confused, and what they experience at that level can be life changing for the rest of their lives.”

“That’s like putting kids in a viper pit,” Staver declared. “They’re not ready for that. So, I would not do anything that jeopardizes the care and the responsibility that you have to protect those kids, with their parents, and put them in a proper biblical environment that is free of undue influences.”

The Christianese isn’t hard to translate here. Conservative Christians have spent decades demonizing LGBTQ people and it’s been a losing battle. That’s largely because more and more people now know someone who’s openly gay and they’ve realized those conservative Christians have been lying to them this whole time. Just as you’re far more likely to see a youth pastor arrested for being a child predator than a drag queen, they know being gay doesn’t make you evil. Gay people aren’t “recruiting” children, they’re not trying to “sexualize” anybody, and they’re not bad people by nature of their orientation. (Obviously, individual exceptions apply, just as they would any group.)

(I remember as a child the song "Love Child" was a quasi protest song about how children born out of wed lock were persecuted because their parents weren't married. I see this as a similar mind set. Demonizing children to try to punish the parent(s).)