Thursday, December 16, 2010

Youth Development Current Trends – Dr. Caitlin Ryan and The Family Acceptance Projects’ Study of LGBT Youth – December 13, 2010 - National Association of Social Workers


December 13, 2010 – NASW Member Dr. Caitlin Ryan, Director of the San Francisco based Family Acceptance Project, has released a study that found that accepting parental and caregiver behaviors — such as welcoming their children’s openly LGBT friends or supporting their gender expression — protect their LGBT children against depression, substance abuse, suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts in early adulthood. In addition, LGBT youth with highly accepting families have significantly higher levels of self-esteem, social support and better overall health in young adulthood.

The study was published in the November 2010 issue of the international Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing. This follows Dr. Ryan’s study published in Developmental Psychology in the same month which shows that LGBT young adults who do not conform to socially proscribed gender behavior as adolescents report higher levels of anti-LGBT victimization, and higher levels of depression and impaired life satisfaction in adulthood.  Dr. Ryan’s research has generated a substantial level of consumer media coverage…
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Introduction
To honor LGBT Pride Month we asked Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) social workers to tell us why they chose social work as their profession and to describe the unique challenges facing their community.

Caitlin Ryan, PhD, ACSW

Director, Family Acceptance Project™

Marian Wright Edelman Institute,
San Francisco State University

San Francisco, California

Q. Where did you earn your social work degree? What is your area of expertise and where are you currently employed?
I received my MSW from Smith College School for Social Work. My undergraduate work focused on human sexuality and my doctorate is in public policy with a focus on health policy.

I have worked on health and mental health issues for lesbians and gay men and LGBT adolescents for the past 35 years. My work started in the lesbian and gay health movement before AIDS where I worked to develop early networks of lesbian and gay health providers across the country.

I initiated the National Lesbian Care Survey to define lesbian health needs in the late 1970s, developed community-based AIDS services at the beginning of the epidemic, and have worked to implement quality care for LGBT adolescents since the early 1990s.

In 2002, I started the Family Acceptance Project (FAP), a research, intervention, education and policy initiative that promotes family support and healthy futures for LGBT children and adolescents. I am based at the Marian Wright Edelman Institute and am affiliated with the César E. Chávez Institute at San Francisco State University...
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National Association of Social Workers

About Social Workers

Every social worker is uniquely qualified to help people right in their own environment, by looking at all the different aspects of their life and culture. We work to ensure your personal well-being, prevent crises and to counsel individuals, families, and communities. We make sure people get the help they need, from the best resources available. And for more than 100 years, we’ve been doing just that.

Social workers care for people in every stage of life, from children to the elderly. We help them overcome life’s most difficult challenges, and the troubles of everyday living, including:
Read complete listing of stages of life & much more:


“Someday,
maybe, there will exist a well-informed, well considered and yet fervent public conviction that the most deadly of
all possible sins is the mutilation of a child’s spirit.”


Angels In America 
[Official HBO Trailer]


I'm His Child
Zella Jackson Price




Prayers for Bobby star Sigourney Weaver
 December 15, 2010 – The Advocate

Dream Weaver

Prayers for Bobby star Sigourney Weaver discusses the film’s continued impact, offers words of advice for bullied gay youth, and expresses her hope for a chance to play a gay character.

Sigourney Weaver again establishes herself as one of our most dependable allies by continuing to get the word out about Prayers for Bobby, the acclaimed 2009 television film based on the true story of a young gay man who killed himself due to his mother’s intolerance. When the actress initially promoted the film before its premiere, she told The Advocate, “I’m horrified by how hard Americans are making it for my gay friends to live.” Now, nearly two years later and with teenagers still committing suicide due to antigay bullying, the film has finally been released on DVD.

The actress, who received numerous award nominations for her searing performance as Mary Griffith, Bobby’s confused, conservative mother, again volunteered to promote the film due to its special meaning for her and its potential to aid troubled gay teenagers and their families.

The wide-ranging career of the three-time Academy Award–nominated Weaver encompasses kick-ass action heroines in the Alien films and inspired comic turns in hits like Working Girl, which have endeared her to LGBT audiences. Yet her role in Prayers for Bobby is one the actress holds in a unique place apart from the rest. Weaver speaks to The Advocate about Prayers’ continued relevance, offers words of advice for bullied gay youth, and expresses her hope that someone offers her a gay role.
Read complete interview:
Related links:


GAY YOUTH SUICIDE | BENEDICT XVI & BISHOPS Child Sexual Abuse Cover-ups – Negligence Protecting (1) Children & (2) LGBT Children | Family of Rutgers suicide victim lends name to bill – November 19, 2010 – CNN


SILENCING GAY YOUTH | Catholic school paper deletes student editorials on Catholic DVD, gay teens
by Sasha Aslanian,
November 16, 2010 - Minnesota Public Radio

St. Louis Park, Minn. — A student newspaper at a suburban Catholic school has sparked a debate over free speech by criticizing a Catholic DVD and defending gay teens. The DVD denouncing same-sex marriage was sent by Minnesota's Catholic bishops to parishioners prior to the Nov. 2 election.

The student newspaper of Benilde-St. Margaret's in St. Louis Park deleted two student editorials over the weekend and shut off the online comments.

The Knight Errant student newspaper published a news story last Thursday about the bishops' "Preserving Marriage in Minnesota" DVD.

But it was the two editorials that accompanied it -- and the online comments they inspired -- that created the uproar. One staff editorial challenged the bishops' arguments against same-sex marriage and called the DVD "unsubstantiated."

Senior Bernardo Vigil helped write the piece.

"We did expect a little bit of a pushback from that, which there was. A lot of the comments were 'this shouldn't have been published, this is a Catholic school,'" Vigil said.

But the op-ed that touched off the cyberstorm was editor Sean Simonson's piece, "Life as a gay teenager."
Read / listen complete report:
Related links:

GAY YOUTH CATHOLIC SILENCING | The student newspaper editorial Benilde-St. Margaret's doesn't want you to see - By David Brauer, November 15, 2010 – MinnPost.com


Difference Between Life & Death - Being “In” And Living “Out” Of The Closet - "Why It Is A 'Gift' From God!!!" - Monastic Wisdom – Absolute Fright For Benedict XVI


Hating Gays: 
An Overview of Scientific Studies
by Gregory M. Herek
Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)

…It frequently is assumed that feelings of personal threat result in strong negative attitudes toward homosexuality, whereas lack of threat leads to neutral or positive attitudes. This perspective often is associated with the term homophobia, and it derives from a psychodynamic view that prejudiced attitudes serve to reduce tension aroused by unconscious conflicts.

Attitudes are likely to serve a defensive function when an individual perceives some analogy between homosexual persons and her or his own unconscious conflicts. Subsequently, that person responds to gay men and lesbians as a way of externalizing inner conflicts and thereby reducing the anxiety associated with them. The conflicts specific to antihomosexual prejudice presumably involve a person's gender identity, sexual object choice, or both. For example, unconscious conflicts about one's own sexuality or gender identity might be attributed to lesbians and gay men through a process of projection. Such a strategy permits people to externalize the conflicts and to reject their own unacceptable urges by rejecting lesbians and gay men (who symbolize those urges) without consciously recognizing the urges as their own. Since contact with homosexual persons threatens to make conscious those thoughts that have been repressed, it inevitably arouses anxiety in defensive individuals. Consequently, defensive attitudes are likely to be negative… - International Day Against Homophobia
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UNIDENTIFIED - Internalized Homophobia 
Devastating, and Horrific Consequences On Innocent Children 
PERPETUATING GENERATIONS HATRED & VIOLENCE ---


DEHUMANIZATION – “The Lucifer Effect” by Philip Zimbardo (2007) | BENEDICT XVI & BISHOPS - Child Sexual Abuse COVER-UPS & Implicit Child Abuse of LGBT Children


AUSCHWITZ -- CHRISTMAS 2008 -- A flashback far more severe than in --- BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (NP)
And when I heard what Pope Benedict XVI said about homosexuals and transgendered human beings at Christmas 2008, I felt that same trauma all over again. Because in some way, somehow, he was conveying in a non-verbal manner the horror of the Holocaust, in what appears to be a traumatized, trance-like, accepted social norm from that period of time dictating that some people just don’t count, aren’t important, and can be easily disposed of. And if you rock the boat, you could be next to be disposed of…
Read complete report:


400,000 Anti-gay marriage DVDs - $1 million Nienstedt - Minnesota October 29, 2010 - RELIGION & ETHICS PBS – video (NP)
Hysteria comes in different styles – sending out 400,000 anti-gay marriage DVDs that is void of any qualified scriptural, theological or scientific, psychological documentation, references could easily be classified as over the top hysteria, regardless of a perceived calm demeanor of the sender.  It is even more alarming that this message contained in these DVDs is in direct contradiction to all accredited research and study in both fields of scripture and science. Such an action by an individual would be a cause of concern of a break with reality? Or dissociation? Kids Are Being Hurt!!!


Sexual orientation - Internalized Homophobia  
“Auschwitz – Benedict XVI - Christmas 2008 -A flashback far more severe than in Brokeback Mountain” 
GAY TEENAGE SUICIDE - Fr. Marty Kurylowicz 
Attachment Theory Photo
Nothing in life is more precious than the intimate relationships we have with love ones. Healthy love relationships delight us give us confidence to take on challenges and support us in difficult times. Photo
  

Gay marriage -> Restoring 
"Hope of Love" 
To Children In Early Childhood -> Marriage Equality
March 23, 2010 – by Fr. Marty Kurylowicz
Marriage Equality, like Galileo, is the truth about the facts of growing up gay. Marriage Equality will not become a reality until people learn that its most vital purpose is that it restores the “hope of love” to children in early childhood – essential to their development and well-being for life. Without Marriage Equality we teach children how to hate love and how to be mean and indifferent to people as adults. With all due respect, without Marriage Equality we would teach them in much the same way as has been shown by Benedict XVI and the hierarchy, especially in their lack of care and protection of children for decades.



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