This is a great development. Media pressure and the suicides of six or more gay kids this past week have led Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to release a forceful statement. I'm a proponent of this type of move, and I think it's what will slowly help people view LGBT people as equal to straight people.
Duncan says, "This is a moment where every one of us — parents, teachers, students, elected officials, and all people of conscience — needs to stand up and speak out against intolerance in all its forms,"[...] "Whether it's students harassing other students because of ethnicity, disability or religion; or an adult, public official harassing the President of the University of Michigan student body because he is gay, it is time we as a country said enough. No more. This must stop."
It's not like bullying has just now gotten out of hand, and it's not like gay teen suicides are just now at an all-time high, but this time our government is noticing. This is a problem we've faced alone for years. It's something our government and our communities and our schools have turned a blind eye toward. It's, simply put, one of the ways that the government has been perpetuating hatred toward gay people. If you see this going on and you don't step up and say anything, you're keeping this system of hate in place, and it looks like the government has decided to stop.
I've written this before but I once read a post here about the civil war and secession. The diarist wrote about why we seceded, in case anyone had any misguided notions that it had anything to do with something as bland as states rights. They linked a few of the speeches given to state legislatures on secession, and a few of them specifically mentioned that they had to secede because once Lincoln was elected president, the government would call slavery a "moral evil" and their cause to uphold slavery would be dead.
This is why I'm such a strong proponent of things like this. The government needs to be out there calling anti-gay hatred a moral evil. They need to be out there saying bullying is wrong. And they need to work to end the anti-gay laws which still plague us and which, to some extent, belie their claims that anti-gay hatred is wrong.
If we can do this, if we can start now and work to call these things what they are every day - evil and wrong - and if we can work to end the government punishments against LGBT people, we could possibly fix so many of these problems. It won't be easy and it won't be fast but this is a start.
Full statement can be found here.