Kids In The Hall’s Scott Thompson To Gay Teens: ‘Grow A Pair’

I know that anti-bullying campaigns are all the rage these days — Lady Gaga just started a foundation to fight bullying. I confess I find the whole anti-bullying trend a bit, well, trendy; it’s not as if bullying is a new phenomenon. And while I’m happy that adults are taking it more seriously — or claiming to — I doubt passing laws aimed at preventing kids from bullying each other is going to stop kids from acting on the more unfortunate aspects of human nature. Adding layers of bureaucracy is not likely to cure the problem. It’s always been up to parents and school officials to look out after kids being picked, and more importantly, teach people to stand up for themselves?

Anyway, as fashionable as the anti-bullying campaigns are, I was pretty happy to read this advice from the hilarious gay stand-up comedian and actor Scott Thompson, of “Kids in the Hall” fame. Here he is on the major flaw in the anti-bullying campaigns:

Here’s the thing: The world is not kind to us; it never really will be. The gay male is always going to be at the bottom. I believe the things that happened to me as a child scarred me terribly, and I wish somebody would have helped me with some of the things that happened. But you have to fight back. So much of these bullying campaigns are part of the trend that we were just talking about””the recasting of gay men as eternal victims and it’s like, fight back! Fathers should start teaching the boys how to punch. He does that to you, here’s what you do: You [expletive] punch him in the face.

I’m not sure that the solution to bullying is necessarily learning to hit back (not that I think that standing up for yourself by fighting is unwarranted, either). But whether your kid is being taunted for his sexual orientation or for any of the millions of things that kids get bullied for during the hellishness of junior high school — we should put just as much effort into raising kids who are not victims as we do trying to stop the kids who are doing the bullying.

What do you think? Does Thompson have a point or should he just stick to comedy?