It got… Worse
September 22, 2011.
Jamey was an awkward kid. He got teased for his mannerisms. He preferred hanging out with girl classmates more than the boys.
At 14 years old, a time when nearly every human being is coming to a peak of identity confusion and social frustration, Jamey decided that he must be gay. He found his way to a website called “It Gets Better,” dedicated to inspiring “LGBT youth” to help them overcome bullying. Thousands upon thousands of people have recorded inspirational video-messages to struggling teenagers on the site, from President Barack Obama to several professional sports teams. Inspired, Jamey even recorded his own message of hope, too.
Yet somehow, within months of finding “It Gets Better” Jamey Rodemeyer is dead, the victim of an apparent suicide. What went wrong?
The Project called “It Gets Better” has taken on an extremely sensitive mission of counseling troubled teenagers, in an especially vulnerable subset, those who are experimenting with non-traditional sexual roles. The site was created by a man named Dan Savage, who is not an adolescent psychologist, nor a therapist. He’s a journalist who writes “Savage Love,” a sex column. He regards himself as gay, and wanted to do something to help out gay teenagers. Setting out with simple, good intentions, the site now boasts 25,000 video recordings of hope.
The site explains,
“Many LGBT youth can't picture what their lives might be like as openly gay adults. They can't imagine a future for themselves. So let's show them what our lives are like, let's show them what the future may hold in store for them… The website www.itgetsbetter.org is a place where young people who are lesbian, gay, bi, or trans can see how love and happiness can be a reality in their future. It’s a place where our straight allies can visit and support their friends and family members. It’s a place where people can share their stories, take the It Gets Better Project pledge, watch videos of love and support.”
It Gets Better says that teens who call themselves gay or lesbian often are bullied, and they suffer a disproportionately high suicide rate. Underneath the expressions of warmth and compassion, however, is an undercurrent of blame. The site encourages visitors to take a pledge to support gays and lesbians and stand up to discrimination of any kind. It seems to go hand in hand – our sympathy for the pain of gays and lesbians translates into rejecting the moral values of people who consider their behavior unacceptable.
Instead of blaming other people for bullying and intolerance, it’s high time we examine how the gay and lesbian image is proving to be such a colossal failure and disappointment for teenagers.
In the past decades, the medical and psychological establishment have retracted their original diagnosis, that a person who is dominated by homosexual impulses suffers a form of mental or emoptional disorder. In the march of political progress, it appears that the medical community may now regard any form of sexual gratification to be perfectly natural. The only people who are sick, they seem to suggest, are the ones who object to the normalization of homosexuality.
We might suggest that “It Gets Better” rests on a false premise. Mr. Savage might be right, that these kids don’t have good role models. But while it might be thrilling and cool for the site’s owners to collect video recordings from celebrities coming together for a good cause, this is a cold consolation for a tortured kid sitting alone in his parents’ house. Kids aren’t stupid, they know that these celebrities might be well meaning but they have no idea about the pain they are personally experiencing.
But staring at a message on a computer screen is not going to do it. They need people, real human beings, to take the time to care about them. They need attention from parents, and compassion from teachers. Apparently, Jamey had therapists and social workers trying to help him. But more than that, children to be given direction to discover ways to positively invest their energies. They need to harness all these energies to build and accomplish, whether its volunteering for community service, or academics, or sports. Instead, “It Gets Better” tells kids: this is all you really are. You don’t need to change, you don’t need to struggle. Your impulses are your real self.
At 14 years old, in making his declaration of his new identity, Jamey Rodemeyer forfeited any hope of marrying a wife and raising a family, the way his parents, grandparents and great grandparents had done since the beginning of time. After his declaration, the act of physical relations had become a defining feature of this 14 year old’s personality. But regardless of how strong a message is lobbied or broadcast over the entertainment and news media, trying to normalize homosexual behavior, intimate relations between two men or two women is an aberration of the true human form, a waste of potential, and a spiritual, physical and societal dead end.
Let’s not forget what happened. A beautiful child has died. This is a tragedy for all of us, as Americans and as human beings. But we might hope that this needless tragedy will give pause to sex missionaries and let them leave off their work of preying on the minds and souls of our most vulnerable children.
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