tagged w/ gay suicides
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Rutgers to let some male, female students room together
By Leigh Remizowski, CNN
March 2, 2011 1:29 a.m. EST
Rutgers OKs co-ed dorm rooms
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
University wants to be more inclusive
About 55 other universities have "gender-neutral" housing, organizer says
Rutgers' impetus was gay student's suicide
(CNN) -- In the wake of the high-profile suicide of a gay Rutgers University student last fall, the New Jersey college will implement gender-neutral housing in an attempt to make the university more inclusive.
Twenty to 30 students will participate in a pilot program during the 2011-12 school year, which will allow students to choose their roommates regardless of gender. Three dormitories in New Brunswick, New Jersey, will be part of the pilot program, a Rutgers spokesman said.
Students must apply to live in the gender-neutral rooms, which will be reserved for sophomores, juniors and seniors.
"This has been under discussion for a long time," university officials said in a statement. "In the aftermath of the Clementi tragedy, members of the university's LGBTQ community told the administration that gender-neutral housing would help create an even more inclusive environment. Since then, the university has been exploring this in greater detail."
Tyler Clementi, 18, jumped from the George Washington Bridge in September after two other Rutgers students allegedly videotaped a sexual encounter between him and another man and posted the video online.
"Maybe the outcome would have been different if he had been able to choose his own roommate," said Yousef Saleh, 22, president of the Rutgers University Student Assembly. "At least now there's an option."
Rutgers junior Ryan Harrington, 21, said the student body has been pushing for gender-neutral housing for years and most students are happy with the university's decision.
"It gives people more options and it makes people feel safe in their own living environment," he said, adding that the issue is especially important for transgender students.
Rutgers' pilot program is a part of a national trend for colleges, said Jeffrey Chang, the co-founder of the National Student Genderblind Campaign, a nonprofit organization that works with college students to develop LGBT policies. Chang estimates that there are 55 universities across the United States that have implemented gender-neutral rooming initiatives.
"I think there definitely has been a really accelerated growth," said Chang, who is also a law student at Rutgers. "Just within the past year, we've seen 10 schools with gender-neutral housing."
Several schools, including Ohio University, Emory University and Columbia University will begin allowing co-ed rooming in the fall as well.
George Washington University in Washington, D.C., is another addition to the list of schools that permit gender-neutral housing. Senior Michael Komo, 22, helped lead the campaign at his school, which will allow students to choose their roommates in all but three all-girls residence halls during the 2011-12 school year.
"These issues have always been there, but they're finally getting the attention they need and deserve," said Komo, who is president of Allied in Pride, a LGBT student organization on campus.Rutgers to let some male, female students room together
By Leigh Remizowski, CNN... more
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Suicides prompt pastor to come out
November 13th, 2010
10:47 PM ET
Pastor says student's suicide was tipping point for his coming out
The founder and pastor of a Georgia megachurch said Saturday that the September suicide of a Rutgers University student was the tipping point for his decision to come out of the closet to his congregation.
"For some reason, his situation was kind of the tipping point with me," said Jim Swilley, who calls himself as a bishop. "There comes a point in your life where you say - how much time do we have left in our lives? Are we going to be authentic or not?"
Rutgers student Tyler Clementi, 18, jumped off a bridge after a secretly-taped sexual encounter between him and another man was posted on the internet.
Swilley, 52, said that he has known he is gay since childhood, but that he never thought he would live openly. He came out recently after more than 20 years of marriage to his former wife, who continues to work at their church.
"At a certain point, you are who you are," said Swilley, who has four children from two marriages.
He ministers at the Church in the Now, an inter-donominational Christian church in Conyers, Georgia, about 25 miles east of Atlanta.
"What I told my church is that I was given two things in my life that I didn't ask for... one is the call of God in my life and the other is my orientation. I didn't ever think that those two things could be compatible," Swilley said.
On the whole, he said his congregation has been supportive of his coming out, though some people have cut ties with him over the decision.
Homosexuality is a hotly contested issue by many faith traditions.
Earlier this month, Gene Robinson - the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church - said that death threats and the continued controversy around his selection contributed to his decision to announce his retirement.
Speaking specifically about evangelicals, Swilley said gay people are sometimes seen as trying to build a movement, or "recruiting" - views he took serious issue with.
"My position is not about gaying up the church," he said. "It's about people being who they are."
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http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2010/images/11/13/c1main.jim.swilley.cnn.jpgSuicides prompt pastor to come out
November 13th, 2010
10:47 PM ET
Pastor says... more
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Great new ad, features Gene Simmons and Slash among other faces. Good delivery with even better message.Great new ad, features Gene Simmons and Slash among other faces. Good delivery with... more
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Fourteen-year-old Brandon Bitner walked in front of a tractor-trailer in the early hours of Friday morning, and his friends say the Middleburg, Penn. child was driven to suicide after being bullied about his perceived sexual orientation.
“It was because of bullying,” friend Takara Jo Folk wrote in a letter to The Daily Item of Sunbury, Penn. “It was not about race, or gender, but they bullied him for his sexual preferences and the way he dressed. Which they wrongly accused him of.”
Bitner, a freshman at Midd-West high school, dressed in emo-style clothing and was bullied mercilessly for it, according to fellow students. “Anyone in our school who looks different is tortured,” sophomore Emily Beall-Ellersieck told The Daily Item.
Midd-West high school held an antibullying assembly just days prior to Bitner's suicide, but students said no one took it seriously.Fourteen-year-old Brandon Bitner walked in front of a tractor-trailer in the early... more
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The grandson of antigay televangelist Oral Roberts has a message for “my people — homosexuals.” It gets better.
Randy Robert Potts (pictured), a former middle school English teacher now pursuing a career as a writer, says in a column and accompanying video for The Washington Post that his grandfather “and most of his generation” describe gay people “as an abomination.”
In the video, Potts talks about his uncle Ronald David Roberts. Ronald came out to his father in high school. According to Potts, Oral Roberts “did not want a gay son,” and when Ronald was in his 30s, six months after getting a divorce, he shot and killed himself.
Potts says that his mother, like her father, does not want a gay son. At his grandfather’s funeral just last year, Potts says his mother told him that “hell does exist, and I’m going there.”
In the years since coming out, Potts says he’s lived in fear of losing his children because he’s gay. He says he even considered suicide, but with help and time, it got better.The grandson of antigay televangelist Oral Roberts has a message for “my people... more
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Arkansas education officials condemn anti-gay posts by a school board member. A screen grab shows anti-gay comments on the Facebook page of Clint McCance. The state Education Department is "dismayed," a spokeswoman says.Arkansas education officials condemn anti-gay posts by a school board member. A screen... more
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Suicides. Gay bashings. Targeting and torturing people just because they are gay. It has been a difficult time for any of us who love our kids, our friends, our families and our neighbors – to watch people we love beaten and killed because of who they are. Yet this is every day for some people – lesbian, gay, bisexual transgender (LGBT) people who have lived with fear and violence each time they leave the house, go to work, walk down the street or kiss their partner good-bye.
Violence against LGBT people has not suddenly increased – it has been increasing all along. In 2008, we had the most violent year for LGBT people since Matthew Shepard was murdered ten years ago. October 2009 was the most violent month of 2009 and the same month that President Obama signed the Matthew Shepard James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Law. During the latter half of 2009 and early 2010, a gay or transgender person was killed every month in Puerto Rico. What has increased alarmingly is the severity of the violence — anti-LGBT violence becomes more brutal each year.
Why is this happening? At the Anti Violence Project (AVP) we know that the more visible we are, the more vulnerable we are to those who would act on their anti-LGBT prejudice. Over the past ten years, we have seen a historic increase in visibility around LGBT civil rights — we are regularly included in national, state and local debates about politics and policy. For every person who speaks to the necessity to achieve equality and respect for LGBT people there is another who spews anti-LGBT rhetoric. With bus tours preaching against gay folks or signs that promote nooses as the “solution” to same-sex marriage these are dangerous times. Tens of millions of dollars are spent by so-called community leaders and anti-gay groups each year to denigrate and denounce LGBT people, creating a culture of hate that results in attacks and suicides.
Anti-gay rhetoric promotes the stigma and isolation that drives LGBT youth to take their own lives and encourages violent gay bashings, and we've seen the very real harm this does. Hate speech creates a hostile environment that demeans LGBT people and encourages physical attacks against our communities. Anti-LGBT hate speech is dangerous, it is ignorant and it is wrong.
The rhetoric is all that more dangerous because it is supported by national anti-LGBT policy. Every national law in this country, save one, either excludes LGBT people or discriminates against us. The only law that protects us, the Matthew Shepard James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Law, is the one meant to prosecute those who would harm us because of this culture of hate. And in what has become a painful irony, the government’s failure to repeal the laws that actively discriminate against us — "don't ask, don't tell", the Defense of Marriage Act — and refusal to pass those that would acknowledge our equality, such as the Employment Non-Discrimination Act or a fully inclusive Civil Rights Act, contributes to this culture of hate.Suicides. Gay bashings. Targeting and torturing people just because they are gay. It... more
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President Obama appeared in a video in support of gay teenagers on Thursday as part of the It Gets Better Project, an initiative launched by writer Dan Savage.
In the video, Obama says that he was "shocked and saddened" by a string of gay teenagers who have committed suicide in recent weeks. "We've got to dispel this myth that bullying is just a normal rite of passage," the president adds.
"To every young person out there, you need to know that if you're in trouble there are caring adults who can help," he continues. Invoking his own history, Obama says that he knows "what it's like growing up feeling that sometimes you don't belong."
Looking straight into the camera, the president tells his audience, "You are not alone. You didn't do anything wrong. You didn't do anything to deserve being bullied. And there is a whole world waiting for you, filled with possibilities. There are people out there who love you and care about you just the way you are. And so, if you ever feel like, because of bullying, because of what people are saying, that you're getting down on yourself, you've got to make sure to reach out to people you trust."
The president's message comes in the same week that his administration continued to fight to uphold "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" in court. As a result, Lt. Dan Choi, who was discharged from the Army for being gay, announced on Thursday that he will not vote for Obama in 2012.President Obama appeared in a video in support of gay teenagers on Thursday as part of... more
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October 21st, 2010
03:14 PM ET
Churches contribute to gay suicides, most Americans believe
Fort Worth Texas Councilman Joel Burns’ videotaped story about being gay and bullied as a child recently went viral on the internet.
Two out of three Americans believe gay people commit suicide at least partly because of messages coming out of churches and other places of worship, a survey released Thursday found.
More than four out of 10 Americans say the message coming out of churches about gay people is negative, and about the same number say those messages contribute "a lot" to negative perceptions of gay and lesbian people.
Catholics were the most critical of their own churches' messages on homosexuality, while white evangelical Christians gave their churches the highest grades, the survey found.
The Public Religion Research Institute asked 1,017 Americans their views on religion and homosexuality between October 14 and 17, in the wake of a highly publicized rash of suicides by gay people.
Gay rights campaigner Dan Savage said the idea that churches send out an anti-gay message "totally jibes with my experience and that of millions of other gay and lesbian people."
He cited Joel Burns, a Forth Worth, Texas, city councilman whose emotional tale of being bullied as a young gay man went viral on the internet.
"He remembers being told to go home and commit suicide and that he was going to hell," Savage said, adding that the source of such attitudes "wasn't in algebra."
Leaders of the Christian right "have redefined Christianity so that it is about being anti-gay," he said.
And he cited other poll findings that suggest more Americans than ever before define themselves as having no religion.
"When you dig down, you found people who said they were Christians who didn't want to be identified with being anti-gay," he argued.
But Jim Daly, the head of Focus on the Family, argued in a commentary for CNN that Christian churches are not to blame.
"To violate the dignity of another person, in any form or fashion, is to contradict the very basis of Gospel-centered living. And to suggest that an orthodox understanding of Christianity encourages abuse against homosexuals is a sad misreading of the very tenets of the faith," he said.
"Some self-described Christians do not act in Christ-like ways toward those who are different than they are," he conceded.
"They save their harshest judgments for the sins they don't struggle with themselves. That is not biblical Christianity in practice," he said.
Only five out of 100 people gave churches generally an A for their handling of "the issue of homosexuality" in the Public Religion Research Institute survey, while 28 percent said their own church handled it well.
One in three people said that messages from places of worship contribute "a lot" to higher rates of suicide among gay and lesbian youth.
Another one in three said they contribute "a little." Only one in five said they do not contribute at all. The rest said they did not know.
Americans were equally split on whether homosexual relationships between adults are wrong, with 44 percent saying yes and 46 percent saying no.
The sampling margin on the survey, a joint project of PRRI and Religion News Service, is plus or minus 3 percentage points.October 21st, 2010
03:14 PM ET
Churches contribute to gay suicides, most Americans... more
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The parents of Zach Harrington, a young gay man from Norman, Okla., who took his own life this month, say that an antigay municipal meeting may have driven their son to suicide.
According to the Dallas Voice, “On Sept. 28, Harrington attended a three-hour public hearing on a proposal to declare October gay history month in the city. Although the council ultimately approved the proposal, Harrington’s parents described the meeting as potentially ‘toxic’ for their son, a private person who internalized his feelings.”
Harrington, 19, struggled with his sexual orientation at his conservative high school in Norman, according to the Voice. He took his own life at his family’s home seven days after he attended the city council meeting.The parents of Zach Harrington, a young gay man from Norman, Okla., who took his own... more
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This is a memorial for Tyler Clementi, who was an 18-year-old Rutgers University freshman when he jumped from the George Washington Bridge in an apparent suicide in September 2010, days after he had been secretly filmed during an intimate encounter which was then broadcast on the Internet.
This piece includes a color photograph, a video message from Ellen DeGeneres and a music video, “The Gorecki Symphony No. 3: Symphony of Sorrowful Songs."
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2010/10/02/in-memoriam-tyler-clementi-1992-2010/This is a memorial for Tyler Clementi, who was an 18-year-old Rutgers University... more
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