He talks about all of it here. Bullying. The bigots who are going after JC Penney and Ellen DeGeneres. Teen suicide. How Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann are the worst people in America. All of it. I don’t care whether you like Howard or not, take twelve minutes right now.

Tragically, Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi committed suicide last fall after being outed by his roommate. His death was a starting point in what has become a rallying cry for the LGBT community and our allies in stopping the bullying and humiliation that so sadly leads far too many gay kids to take their own lives.

His older brother James is also gay, and has written his little brother a series of beautiful, sad letters, published by Out. Please read it all, and have tissue handy. I’ll excerpt some of it here, and then click over.

James describes the moment when he realized that his younger brother was also gay, and how they eventually came out to each other:

I ’m not sure when I first realized my younger brother was gay. I think I knew he was for as long as I knew I was. I had no idea how to bring it up; it was just something we left dangling in the air, unsaid. I was open about my sexuality with friends, but around my family there was this barrier that felt unbreakable. It slowly dawned on me that I wasn’t the only one, that I had a brother who was also gay — my baby brother, whom I had always felt protective and paternal toward. I knew I was in a position to be a confidant, a role model. But I wasn’t ready to do any of that. It would have made it much less lonely for me to grow up with an older brother who had gone through and understood everything I was dealing with — and I wanted to be that for Tyler.

[...]

It was the Fourth of July. We had spent the day at the movies, the diner, the fireworks. So many opportunities, and I kept chickening out. That night, I found him in the house listening to Katy Perry, and I saw that, if I couldn’t do this now, something was really wrong with me. I overthought it — because it ended up being this simple.

Me: “I’m gay.”
Tyler: “Oh. Me too.”

Heh. Now a few excerpts from the letters:

Pipsqueak,
You were one noisy kid. I remember walking inside and the most beautiful sounds of Tchaikovsky and Mozart would waft through every room. And I hated it.

Remember how I used to bang on your door and scream at you to stop being so loud? It was so unfair that I had to listen to your noise all the time — why couldn’t you just pick up a quieter hobby!? I would refuse to attend your recitals and concerts because I had to listen to you play all the damn time at home. Wow, do I regret that.

It is so quiet now. You were really talented; it was a gift. I’m not sure I ever told you that… maybe you didn’t care. It’s not like you needed my validation; I know nothing about classical music and you knew you were the shit when it came to that damn violin. I just feel really bad for not telling you how awesome you are, how much I respect your skills and dedication. I regret not listening to every note with open ears, not going to more concerts. Fuck you for making me feel bad; it’s not fair that you did that to me. But I would tell you now if I could, I really miss the noise!

About all the publicity surrounding Tyler’s death:

I wonder what you would think, seeing all the commotion you’ve caused. It is surreal and meaningless to see you as a mere story on The New York Times, a brief glimpse at a life with none of the detail. You were a typical college freshman, trying to adjust to a dorm room, make some friends, meet a cute guy, and enjoy your independence, and no one noticed. The headlines tell of how you were violated and ridiculed; your last moments are a cautionary tale, a scandal, something to sell and entertain.

You are on every talk show, newspaper, and blog, being held up as the issue du jour for the masses to “care about,” like they ever read you a story or wiped away your tears or spun you around in the air until you were dizzy. I wish it didn’t take you dying for your soul to know peace. I wish you could read the hundreds of letters we got, hear the thousands who rallied and marched for you, know the millions who followed your story on the 6 o’clock news. You were never alone; it just felt like it.

Having a younger brother who is close to me, I can’t handle the beginning of this letter:

Little Peanut,
I always thought that, between you and I, you were the stronger one.

That entire letter is amazing, but I don’t want to spoil it by merely excerpting it. Nor do I want to spoil the rest.

Take a few minutes.

[h/t David Badash/photo via Out Magazine, courtesy of James Clementi]

So sad. News has been circulating the past couple days of the suicide of eighth grader Phillip Parker from Gordonsville, Tennessee:

A Gordonsville boy’s parents say bullying caused their son to take his own life. Phillip Parker, 14, died this week. His parents said he was constantly bullied for being gay.

More than 100 people gathered in Gordonsville on Saturday night, grieving the loss of Phillip.

“He was fun, he was energetic, he was happy,” said Gena Parker, Phillip’s mother.

To his many friends, Phillip was known as the boy who told everyone they’re beautiful.

“He kept telling me he had a rock on his chest,” said Ruby Harris, Phillip’s grandmother. “He just wanted to take the rock off where he could breathe.”

Phillip’s family said they reported their concerns over their son’s bullying to Gordonsville High School on multiple occasions, but the bullying by a group of students just got worse.

Like many kids who are bullied, it seems that Phillip did his best to shoulder the burden alone, so his family didn’t really know the extent of what he was going through. This past weekend, representatives from the Tennessee Equality Project met some current and former teachers at Phillip’s school, and what they found was sadly unexpected. The bullying in school was systemic, and on top of that, Phillip heard religious bullying from pastors, and presumably from fellow churchgoers:

While attending Saturday’s conference, H.G. Stovall and I met a former teacher who knew Phillip while he attended Gordonsville Elementary School. Tears flowed as she told us that Philip had endured years of anti-gay bullying at the school and that bullying in general at Gordonsville Elementary School often goes unaddressed by faculty and staff. She knew of several students who had to transfer to other schools to escape the harassment. This educator also knew Phillip had endured anti-gay preaching from the pulpit of his church.

[...]

We were able to speak to one of Phillip’s teachers. Sadly, she confirmed the same stories we had heard the day before about Philip’s experience at school and at church. She recalled learning that his pastor had recently told him to “pray the devil out him, so he could be straight.” His teacher also remembered that beneath his inner turmoil Philip was always smiling and would often tell his peers how beautiful they were.

For a while now, I’ve been making the point, probably at least once a week, that the message of the Religious Right to LGBT people IS bullying, and it’s not just the icing on the cake. Without the messages coming from the pulpit and from other adults who unfortunately command respect, kids in the schoolyard wouldn’t automatically equate “gay” with “bad,” and wouldn’t feel such a license to make another child’s life a living hell over their sexuality. Sure, kids will always be kids, and no anti-bullying program will eliminate all schoolyard taunts. But the sooner we make the solid connection, as a society, that the kind of bullying that causes gay and questioning kids to feel such despair that they end their young lives, comes directly from adult bullies like the pastor who urged Phillip to “pray away the gay” [to think that people think we're being hyperbolic when we use that phrase...], the sooner we’ll reach a time when I won’t have to write articles about kids killing themselves every damned week.

California teen EricJames Borges, a Trevor Project intern, killed himself this week after a lifetime of relentless assaults on his physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health that included an attack in school, an exorcism by his mother, and an expulsion from his home.

American culture and the people in his life failed EricJames. Words fail me.

[h/t Towleroad]

According to the Twin Cities Daily Planet, a group of conservative parents in Minnesota’s suicide-riddled Anoka-Hennepin school district 11 has presented a deeply homophobic resolution to the school board.

Calling itself the Parents [sic] Action League (PAL), the group demands that ex-gay therapy be offered in schools and that “gay-related immune deficiency” be discussed, presumably as a scare tactic.

The school district, home of Michelle Bachmann, has been in the spotlight for years, in part for its DADT-esque policy of declining to include information about sexual orientation in the curriculum (it calls for staff to “remain neutral” if the topic should arise, whatever that means). It is being sued by the Southern Poverty Law Center, though the school district’s superintendent Denny Carlson has struggled to vindicate the district’s decisions on LGBT issues, stating that “[we at the school district] do not see gay students as living an abnormal lifestyle or as sinners.” PAL members, though their website states that they support the neutrality policy, evidently do not feel it adequately shields their children from information about sexual orientation, and they’re going on the offensive.

Their demands include:

1. A new division within the student support services and a special section on the District 11 website devoted to student of faith, moral conviction, ex-homosexuals and ex-transgenders.

2. A listening tour by Superintendent Denny Carlson and district prevention coordinator Barry Scanlon with students of faith, moral conviction, ex-homosexuals, and ex-transgenders.

3. That District 11 administrators and staff work closely with pro-family and ex-homosexual and ex-transgender organizations to provide ongoing training to school counselors, school nurses, social workers, school psychologists, prevention specialists, student learning advocates and a number of secondary principals and principals.

7. Provide the history of gay-related immune deficiencies and acquired immune deficiencies and the medical consequences of homosexual acts.

9. Provide the following pro-family, ex-homosexual, ex-transgender information and websites to all counselors, school psychologists, classroom teachers [the list was submitted to the board and not spoken at the meeting]

10. Provide pro-family, ex-homosexual and ex-transgender videos to secondary media centers.

Ironically, it would seem that if the district were to adopt PAL’s demands, sexual orientation would then become part of the curriculum, thus violating the neutrality policy PAL purports to approve of. It seems that it’s OK to be non-neutral as long as you’re on the side of misinformation.

The Daily Planet points out that the term “gay-related immune deficiencies” is obsolete, having been used to denote the early cluster of AIDS cases in the early 80s before anyone knew what caused it, and that its resurrection in this context is a clear slur.

[h/t ThinkProgress]

The mark of a good wingnut is to never take responsibility for the harm their cohort inflicts on society. It really doesn’t matter what the bodycount is, or how close to home it is. For them, the ideology is all that matters, even if [as it so often is] their ideology is not only rotten but also easily disproven by a semi-literate child.

Tennessee is a prime example. After the suicide of a gay teen named Jacob Rogers, some wingnuts are doing their best to blame the deceased child, and his sexuality, for his death. Why? Because they care more about their beliefs than they care about this child, or any child:

Anti-gay conservatives are working overtime to explain away the suicide of young Jacob Rogers. They dismiss all the name-calling and bullying at his high school. Instead, they claim it was Jacob’s own fault somehow. In its latest radio report, David Fowler’s F.A.C.T. concedes “it’s wrong to bully people because of their sexual practices”

You know, there’s a Southern expression that’s fairly appropriate here, Mr. Fowler…

but blames Jacob’s death on his own alcohol and drug abuse and eating disorder.

But of course! And not only that:

According to F.A.C.T., it’s all “the rotten fruit of the all-about-me individualist culture that comes when we deny the existence of God and his image in us.”

Don’t blame the people who feed anti-gay discourse into society [people like F.A.C.T.], blame liberals! Blame everybody else!

In correspondence with the Tennessee Equality Project, the state’s main gay rights group, state Rep. John Ragan, R-Oak Ridge, claimed gay people commit suicide at a higher rate than others and suggested Jacob’s sexuality itself drove him to kill himself. Ragan asked whether the suicide could have had “more to do with his own proclivities and behavior than anything to do with schoolmate bullies …”

Rep. Ragan: product of the Tennessee public school system right here. Also gay. The fact that you have a position of power is part of the reason the rest of the developed world makes fun of places like Tennessee. The fact that you would suggest, based on absolutely no factual knowledge of your own, that Jacob’s “proclivities and behavior” led him to suicide, essentially that you would blame Jacob’s sexuality, something he had absolutely no control over, for his death, is the epitome of callousness and petulant Southern hick ignorance, sir. While this is behavior I fully expect from members of Tennessee’s legislative body — I mean, come on, we’re not exactly known as a first world state — it’s particularly saddening, in an age where we all have Google and iPhones, that you remain so blissfully unaware of the world around you, and that you value your own bigotry more than you value Tennessee’s children.

Yes, it is true that Jacob was bullied for being gay, which led to his suicide, but let me draw you a picture* of the chicken and the egg in this situation.

So, that is how it works, Rep. Ragan. Plan your future statements and actions on this issue accordingly.

Oh wait, you won’t, because, as the piece points out, kids like Jacob aren’t what you’re trying to protect.

Blaming the victim is necessary to prevent Jacob’s death from damaging chances for passage of F.A.C.T.’s 2012 state legislative priority—a bill to make it easier for young bigots to bully gay schoolkids. This legislation brought by conservative Christians who oppose special protections for gay people actually gives special protections to homophobic bullies.

*This is why we have a graphic designer. So that I don’t play with my Paint program very often…

I could spend a lot of time rebutting this List of Whine Gary Cass of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission has put out, pointing out, as Joe does, that the one incident that approached violence on the list was probably a hoax, but I think I’ll just remind readers of how sadly often we have had to report in the year 2011 of gay teens taking their own lives due to relentless bullying for their sexuality or their perceived sexuality. Then I would also like readers to remember where anti-gay messages originate, and who gives tacit permission to bullies.

Then read Gary Cass whining about how “victimized” fundamentalists are.

Jacob Rogers, a Tennessee high school student who gave up going to school around Thanksgiving, took his own life yesterday after years of being bullied. He apparently left passwords so other people could see the kind of crap he faced. Watch the video here or read on:

Friends say that kids bullied Jacob Rogers at Cheatham County Central High School for the past four years, but in the past few months it had become so bad he dropped out of school.

And Wednesday, he ended his life.

“He started coming home his senior year saying ‘I don’t want to go back. Everyone is so mean. They call me a f****, they call me gay, a queer,’” friend Kaelynn Mooningham said.

Kaelynn said her friend Jacob felt ignored.

“Jacob told me no one was helping him. He constantly was going to guidance,” she said.

“…How many kids have to die before Cheatham does something,” she said.

Friends of Jacob’s family say they likely don’t have enough money to hold a funeral. Donations for a funeral are being accepted at Sandman’s Ink Shop, a local tattoo shop in Ashland City.

1102 N. Main Street, Ashland City, TN 37015
Hours: Tuesday through Thursday 2 p.m. to 10 p.m.; Friday and Saturday 2 p.m. to 12 a.m.
(615) 792-0506

I haven’t anything eloquent to add to the many moving discussions of these heartbreaking and completely preventable suicides that have followed years of vicious, ignorant attacks by homophobes. I just want to do my bit to make sure they don’t go unnoticed.

Wow, this one comes from Joplin, Missouri. A teacher, whose name is not being released, allegedly posted these remarks on Facebook in response to a story about gay kids committing suicide:

How grotesque. There’s a news video here on the incident, which I can’t seem to embed over here.

Joe noticed that one of America’s Most Vicious Hatemongers, Tony Perkins, is defending the teacher. What’s a little laugh over child suicide among fundamentalist wingnuts, am I right?

Sometimes people think we’re exaggerating when we say that, as we have now reached the tipping point, the majority position in the United States is to support full equality for gay people, and the bigots’ opinions are becoming completely socially unacceptable, those bigots are very likely to become more and more extreme and possibly violent. Watching one of the most well-known “pro-family” leaders in the country defend a person laughing about children committing suicide should open people’s eyes to the true character of our opposition. These are their true colors.

As Joe points out, this is quite a righteous rant. Well spoken, sir.