The Bilerico Project | Daily experiments in LGBTQ

I know, I know, this is totally news to everyone here. In Connecticut, the Department of Children and Families has taken down LGBT information from their website designed to help foster parents and other care-givers handle LGBT youth. Part of the problem was the links they provided to LGBT-friendly churches.

The pressure came from one of the usual suspects:

A conservative political group, and a Christian legal group had threatened to sue over the web pages for the Safe Harbor Project.

American Center for Law and Justice lawyer Vincent McCarthy said his organization sent a letter to the department, "demanding that the state of Connecticut DCF discontinue its endorsement of an alternative religious point of view that endorses the homosexual lifestyle."[...]

Family Institute of Connecticut director Peter Wolfgang said "This was the state stepping in to reeducate our children.

"This is the next big fight, and we will step in to fight it wherever we can, but this was such an obvious open and shut case because it had to do with the state taking a position on religion in clear violation of the first amendment," Wolfgang said.

The article focuses on a page with links to churches being taken down, although I'm not sure how much went. I was able to find this guide to LGBT foster youth (pdf) in there, so it's not all gone.

For the record, I'm not comfortable with a state website linking specific churches and apparently endorsing them, even if they are using an objective standard. But the Religious Right, which won't stop their movement until everyone is forced to practice their specific version of fundamentalist Protestantism, isn't really in a position to cry "separation of church and state" when they think there's a state attempt to "reeducate our children." That's their entire goal. The only differences are in the substance they want to indoctrinate in children with and in the fact that they're usually much more open and brazen in their attempts.

It's just another case in which if they do it it's "protecting our children," but if anyone else does it it's "the state stepping in to reeducate our children."