Twins play it safe in anti-bullying video

After more than a year, the Minnesota Twins have finally jumped into the effort to stop bullying.

It did so, without referencing gays and lesbians, the underpinning of the It Gets Better videos spawned by the suicides of several young gay people.

The San Francisco Giants, and then several other Major League Baseball teams issued It Gets Better videos, and the Twins intended to as well. In fact, they’d already started production of one.

The Twins bagged the idea after Dan Savage, who founded the It Gets Better effort, gave a speech in Seattle:

The Bible says that if your daughter’s not a virgin on her wedding night — if a woman isn’t a virgin on her wedding night, she shall be dragged to her father’s doorstep and stoned to death. Callista Gingrich lives. And there is no effort to amend state constitutions to make it legal to stone women to death on their wedding night if they’re not virgins. At least not yet. We don’t know where the GOP is going these days.

People are dying because people can’t clear this one last hurdle. They can’t get past this one last thing in the Bible about homosexuality.

Um, one other thing I wanna talk about is — [chuckles] — so, you can tell the Bible guys in the hall that they can come back now, because I’m done beating up the Bible. It’s funny, as someone who’s on the receiving end of beatings that are justified by the Bible, how pansy-assed some people react when you push back.

I apologize if I hurt anyone’s feelings. But. I have a right to defend myself. And to point out the hypocrisy of people who justify anti-gay bigotry by pointing to the Bible, and insisting we must live by the code of Leviticus on this one issue and no other.

The Twins decided to take a different approach, a comparably safer approach, in the video released today.

The power of the original It Gets Better videos, was the courage it took for professional athletes to voice their support for gays and lesbian kids.

As for the It Gets Better campaign, a football team has now broken through the barrier, and acknowledged the message is aimed at LGBT youth.