New data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that life is increasingly nightmarish for “LGBTQ+” children in America.
The numbers are truly alarming and should elicit concern among all Americans. But Catholics should be especially vigilant, since bad actors are already busily at work spinning the news in just such a way as to perpetuate rather than solve the problem.
“Nearly 70% of LGBQ+ students experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness,” tweeted Jesuit Fr. James Martin when he saw the latest CDC report. “45% seriously considered attempting suicide. 37% made a suicide plan. 22% attempted suicide. 23% bullied at school. 27% electronically bullied.”
Martin presented the horrific numbers as evidence that “LGBTQ issues” are often “life issues” analogous in their gravity and urgency to the issue of abortion. The Church, he says, “is called to stand with this at-risk community, especially with young LGBTQ people.”
The celebrity priest’s message might be more convincing if it weren’t for the fact that Martin is a full-throated supporter of the secular LGBTQ movement. Because it is under the tutelage of that movement that the number of young Americans in the “at-risk community” of LGBTQ people has skyrocketed from under three percent to over 20 percent in just a few decades.
In other words, Martin seems to be attempting to present what amounts to an admission of the failure of the aggressive LGBTQ agenda being implemented by the Biden administration as evidence that the failed agenda deserves more support from Catholics.
It’s noteworthy that even the physical locations where “LGBTQ+” students are suffering so horribly are federally-controlled public schools. The CDC did not just issue a scandalous report on how poorly children are fairing in churches or parochial Catholic schools.
“More than 95% of children and adolescents in the U.S. spend much of their daily lives in school,” the CDC acknowledged in its report. In other words, the federal government just admitted that children under the care and supervision of the extremely pro-LGBTQ public education system are being driven to suicide on a massive scale.
“The social Left has been in control of virtually all levers of culture and policy for decades,” Ben Shapiro noted in a column responding to the CDC’s revelations:
Now they demand more control in order to alleviate the consequences of the chaos they have created. The answer, of course, is precisely the opposite: the reinvigoration of traditional sources of wisdom and values, the re-inculcation of morality and obligation.
CatholicVote President Brian Burch took it a step further, arguing that the information is a kind of vindication of the teachings of the Catholic Church.
The new data is just science proving “the Church’s compassionate teaching that homosexuality is objectively disordered and causes suffering,” Burch said, and Catholics ought to “pray for all who struggle with sexual disorders, especially vulnerable youth being told—by a priest, no less—that God made them with the wrong body.”