Kids Shouldn’t Kill Themselves…And We Should Care When They Do
Recently I read yet another story about a kid (this time 14 year old Jamey Rodemeyer) who committed suicide because he was gay and had been mercilessly bullied for it for at least a year. These stories come out with far too much regularity. There are few things more tragic than a young kid, with his entire life before him, taking his life because of his own uncertainty about himself and the cruelty of others.
The same day I read about an initiative from Focus on the Family called “True Tolerance.” It is a resource for parents concerned about gay activists promoting an agenda in schools – and it specifically targets anti-bullying efforts in schools, saying that they are instead a way for activists to promote homosexuality.
I was a little stunned. Honestly, I was a lot stunned. I find it hard to believe that efforts aimed at teaching students that GLBT kids have just as much value as others, and that they don’t deserve to be singled out for ridicule and discrimination, are something Christians should be singling out and opposing. Especially when there are numerous instances of kids killing themselves over this very issue.
To be fair, Focus on the Family does believe bullying is wrong – including bullying of GLBT students. But in their rush to ensure that no agenda is being pushed in schools, they claim that it is not necessary to name the specific reasons for bullying. Instead, anti-bullying efforts should focus only on the bullying behavior, and not on the reason behind the behavior. But this seems to me to be a flawed approach, driven primarily by their fear of a gay agenda – if prejudice is driving bullying, the prejudice needs to be dealt with, not just the behavior that occurs as a result of the prejudice. To do otherwise is merely to block the behavior, rather than to deal with the actual cause of the behavior.
And if you think it is ok to taunt and ridicule and intimidate someone because they are gay, that is prejudice. There’s no other word for it. It doesn’t matter what you believe the Bible says about homosexual behavior – prejudice and bullying are always wrong. Always.
I suppose what really bothers me about this issue is this: that from what I have seen, Christians have been largely silent about it.* Celebrities and other professionals – often from within the gay community, but not always – have been vocal about the need to deal with the issue, and have tried to encourage kids experiencing this kind of bullying that it gets better: that they will not experience such bullying for their entire lives. But the Christian community – which should be leading the way against all kinds of prejudice and bullying, even (and maybe especially?) against a group of people whose behavior we may disagree with. Because we all sin. We all fall short of God’s standard. And yet we are all created in God’s image and loved deeply by God.
I hope Christians can agree on that at least.
* I would love to be proven wrong here. If you know of examples of Christians confronting the bullying of GLBT students, please post them in the comments section.
