ENOUGH IS ENOUGH...
(I just this evening read an account of another young person's having committed suicide because he couldn't bear having people know he was gay. He jumped off a bridge... and I read that there were people who said, "good riddance." I didn't feel like waiting to write what I am feeling.)

A couple of years ago a kid named Lawrence King was shot in the head in a crowded classroom in Ventura County, California. His life was ended before it could really get started because another kid named Brandon McInerney had become convinced that, as Pastor Fred Phelps says, “God hates fags,” and that he should hate gay people too, and that he would be doing the world and God a favor to get rid of the boy in his class who had begun to wear makeup and jewelry. Lawrence was fifteen when his life ended. Brandon was fourteen when he committed the crime that would shut him up in prison effectively ending his life as well. Now this week we add eighteen-year-old Tyler Clementi to a growing list of teens who are murdered or commit suicide because of the unbearable burden placed on them in our culture for being gay. His roommate at Rutgers and the roommate’s girlfriend thought it would be fun to expose Tyler’s sexual orientation to the world. Tyler ended is life by jumping off the George Washington Bridge. Earlier this year Alexis Pilkington, a seventeen-year-old Long Island girl killed herself after she had received a string of vicious e-mails, e-mails which continued even after her death. Thirteen-year-old Ryan Halligan of Vermont killed himself after he was accused by classmates of being gay. Some of his classmates encouraged him to commit suicide. As inconceivable as it may seem, some people are so convinced that being gay is such an egregious crime against family and friends that they actually say to the person and to other members of the family that he or she would be better off dead.

Let me come quickly to the point of this journal entry. The tipping point towards suicide for a young gay person may come in encounters outside the family, but it is the family’s response that can save the life of the gay child. Human beings are hardwired to look for acceptance and support from family and from community just as the dove chicks in the nest outside my window each spring are hardwired to expect to be fed by their tireless mother dove. The human mother who says about her child that she would rather see the child dead than be gay is a sick mother. There are many causes of the various sicknesses that afflict people. There is a name for the sickness that causes a mother to turn her own children out of their home, and that name has often had the name church or mosque or synagogue attached to it. Any mother who has been convinced by fundamentalists of any religion that God hates his children has been sold poison with which to destroy the very life of her children. Sadness surges over me when I read of yet another suicide or murder. It’s not just sadness for the person born gay who doesn’t get enough support from family and friends, but it’s sadness for those poor, benighted persons who believe in a cruel, unjust, spiteful god who hates his own creation. Wow! How sick is that!