At a time which should consist of serious reflection and a wake-up call to the consequences of their words and actions over the years, the Religious Right is, unsurprisingly, doubling down, sticking their fingers in their greasy ears, and insisting that they have NOTHING to do with creating the climate that leads gay kids to commit suicide. For example, the Minnesota Family Council:

The Minnesota Family Council (MFC) is pushing back against efforts to improve the climate for LGBT students in the Anoka-Hennepin School District, where community members are mourning suicides by four LGBT students in the last year. The real issue is “homosexual indoctrination,” not anti-gay bullying, says MFC’s Tom Prichard, who says the students are dead because they adopted an “unhealthy lifestyle.” MFC’s campaign against anti-bullying education comes as national religious right groups mount a similar campaign in the aftermath of nearly half a dozen suicides by LGBT students around the country in the last month.

Prichard asserts that the suicide death of 15-year-old Justin Aaberg was not due to anti-LGBT bullying. Aaberg took his life in July, and his mother and friends say anti-LGBT bullying played a factor Prichard claims that “homosexual activists” are “manipulating” his death to get homosexual indoctrination programs into the school district.

“Whatever the exact reason for Justin’s suicide it’s an enormous tragedy that shouldn’t be manipulated for ideological purposes which is what’s being done now,” he wrote on Thursday. “I’ll of course be accused of being unloving, hateful, etc. But is the loving thing to encourage and promote unhealthy and harmful behaviors and practices?”

He continued:

I would agree that youth who embrace homosexuality are at greater risk, because they’ve embraced an unhealthy sexual identity and lifestyle. These alternative sexual identifications or lifestyles deny the reality that we are created male and female. To live or try to live in conflict with how we are made will invariably cause problems, e.g. emotional, psychological and social. Notwithstanding gay activist assertions to the contrary, people aren’t gay, lesbian, transgender, etc. by God’s design or nature. We are male and female with sexual expression designed for a lifelong union between a man and a woman. Denying or fighting against this reality is the reason alternative forms of sexual expression, whether homosexual or heterosexual, will put people at greater risk. To assert otherwise is to deny reality and involves “kicking against the goad” to use a biblical analogy.

How sick. He’s blaming the children. And this ignorant toad is continuing to assert that which is nothing more than Religious Right Diarrhea of the Mouth: that nobody is REALLY gay, that all people were “designed” — by a magic, invisible designer! — for “lifelong union between a man and a woman,” even though all the credible scientific literature basically says that he’s an idiot, when you reduce it to its simplest form.

Anyway, no, Tom Prichard, you repugnant tumor, people ARE gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender, and these kids would have no reason to hate themselves if people like you didn’t waste the only lives they’re ever going to get trying to hurt these kids, their parents, their friends, their families, etc.

Their pigheaded assertions to the contrary, in a world without religious bigotry, gays don’t just “naturally” feel bad about who they are.

Brian at Right Wing Watch also points out that this Prichard character still believes the lie, which only was around for about twelve minutes before it was discredited completely, that Matthew Shepard’s death had nothing to do with his sexuality:

The manipulation of this tragedy is reminiscent of the Matthew Shepard tragedy. Shepard a homosexual was brutally murdered by two men who robbed him. It was asserted that Shepard was murdered, because he was homosexual. It turns out that wasn’t the case. No matter. Shepard’s tragic death served an important ideological purpose for homosexual activists.

Yeah, and it was such an important ideological purpose that his freaking mother decided to change the course of her entire life to educate people on anti-gay bigotry.  She was all part of the eeeeeeeeeevil plan.

This Prichard dude is a supreme moron.

When will these people discover a hint of self-awareness?  Will it hit them like a ton of bricks, or will they go to their graves blissfully unaware of the fact that they’re the bad guys?  Because I don’t think they want to be bad guys.  Their sense of morality and reality is just skewed too far into DSM-IV territory, due to their religious brainwashing.