Last week, I laid into the Mormons and Brigham Young University for their codified bigotry. I also noted that the Mormon Church is but one villain in this drama, and that Brigham Young University is by no means the only campus where homophobia and abuse of LGBT students is a problem.

The Tyler Clementi case may have put a log on the fire of awareness of campus homophobia; certainly the guilty verdict put would-be spies and pranksters on notice that “kids will be kids,” “boys will be boys,” and “it’s just harmless fun on a night in the dorm” are reprehensible explanations for the deeply damaging behavior that led to young Tyler’s suicide, and which continues to be the trigger for an astonishing epidemic of youth suicides.

And suicide is not the only drastic outcome of homophobic abuses, which also include physical assault and even murder.

After the guilty verdict in the tragic Tyler Clementi webcam spying incident (which preceded—and, according to the verdict, precipitated—the freshman’s jump from the George Washington Bridge by mere days), Rutgers University officials assured the public that they did not expect admissions to be affected, and that they were implementing “a number of programs.”

But this awful case cast a harsh light on Rutgers, which even so is in a severe minority of colleges that are addressing the issue of homophobia on campus. For example, Iowa State is the only university with a center for LGBT resources in the entire state of Iowa.

The reality is that Brigham Young University, where a student can be expelled for premarital sex or for acting on homosexual attraction, is among the vast majority of colleges where LGBT students feel unprotected and unsafe. “Less than 7% of schools offer institutional support to LGBT students, such as an LGBT student center or programs director. Only 13% offer nondiscrimination protections on the basis of sexual orientation and just 6% protect students on the basis of gender identity. Only one school, Illinois’ Elmhurst University, asks students demographic questions about sexual orientation and gender identity on its admissions application,” according to Shane Windmeyer, co-founder and executive director of Campus Pride, whose mission is to secure a safer environment for LGBTs on the nation’s college campuses. That’s only about 490 of the roughly 7,000 institutions of higher learning in our country that have created programs or centers to support LGBTs, fewer than a thousand that offer protection to LGBTs, and only 420—a relative handful—that have protections in place based on gender identity.

LGBT people of all ages continue to be targeted and maligned throughout our society. Here is an excellent case in point. This year’s Day of Silence is tomorrow, Friday, April 20. The Day of Silence was created by GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network), to call attention to the challenges, bullying, and ostracism LGBT students experience as a regular part of their school lives. Today (Thursday, April 19) is the official Day of Dialogue, sponsored by the Alliance Defense Fund. This day of so-called dialogue was developed in response to the Day of Silence. Here’s what the ADF video says about its Day of Dialogue:

It’s a day for “speaking up” which “shatters the silence of [the LGBT narrative], by encouraging students to get the conversation started, to talk about the issue [of homosexuality and how it is a choice] . . . start a friendship with someone with a different view [as if people wake up in the morning and say, think I’ll be gay today], and speak the truth in love.”

This kind of love most LGBT people can almost certainly do without.

A word about the Alliance Defense Fund. From its website: “ADF is a legal alliance defending the right to hear and speak the Truth through strategy, training, funding, and direct litigation. We defend Our First Liberty – religious freedom – by empowering our allies, recognizing that together we can accomplish far more than we can alone.” The ADF is raising money to train Christian attorneys to “defend your religious freedom,” it is prosecuting Planned Parenthood for fraud, and it wants to “stop the Obama administration from forcing you to violate your conscience.”

It’s a well-worn, discordant melody, hard on the ears it’s repeated so often, but one that we must, and will, continue to sing, as long as homophobia persists. When political candidates, parents, educators, and religious organizations perpetuate this poisonous pattern of abuse—by wrapping their bigotry up in pretty-, official-sounding bits and bites of justification—they fertilize the ground for more abuse and tragedy, for more Tyler Clementis to be cut down in the very prime of their potential. It has to stop.

Those charged with the education of our young people have a responsibility for their safety, security, and protection when in school. When you consider the enormous number of ways that kids can be inculcated with hate and prejudice, and then add to that the blind eye that educators (from the grade school level up) have traditionally turned to this problem, the phrase “neglect is not benign” leaps to mind. There is growing consciousness of the bullying problem, in general, and homophobic bullying, in particular, and many wonderful organizations and individuals (including Campus Pride) are working hard to change this paradigm. But the fight against homophobia and bullying is still in its infancy, and much more needs to be done. We need a national conversation about this problem on college campuses, and it can’t happen soon enough.

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