Thank you, Dan. I've been working hard to interview LGBTQ students and tell their personal stories – here on Medium and in my column for the Los Angeles Blade. I'm interviewing a 13-year-old and their mother later today about the hateful consequences that arose after their school board mandated that rainbow flags be removed from classrooms.

Maybe to the casual observer, that just sounds like a neutral thing. But to other kids in the school, it was a signal that the kind of hate that you just wrote about is okay.

I don't know the full story yet, but I will later, and I'm anxious to tell it based on what the student and their mother have already emailed me about.

I don't think Americans fully appreciate the kind of hatred and bullying being unleashed on kids by politicians playing up to extremist political bases.

That kind of toxic demagoguery needs to stop, because it's hurting real people, many of them children.