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There’s an epidemic in America: due to the rapidly expanding homophobia tolerated, and rewarded, in our political sphere and due to more tolerance of bullying, LGBTQ teens are taking their own lives in despair and mistaken shame. America is rapidly reaching double-digits in teen suicides in the past few weeks, and these are the ones we know about. Why won’t Barack Obama speak out?
Come out, President Obama. Come out against teen suicide. Come out against hate crimes. You can make a difference in a young person’s life, today.
Today is National Coming-Out Day. Barack Obama can come out strongly against homophobia, intolerance, hate, violence, and bullying. Coming Out Day is the perfect opportunity for the president to confront the public actors — bullies, politicians, pulpit-owners, homophobes, and ignorant bigots. These people make American teens consider, and act on, their suicidal thoughts.
We need presidential leadership, just like we needed presidential leadership in the 1980s on AIDS. President Reagan failed that test, not mentioning AIDS until two years after Hollywood icon Rock Hudson sickened and died in 1985:
Reagan very belatedly addressed the issue of AIDS while president. His remarks came May 31, 1987 (near the end of his second term), at the Third International Conference on AIDS in Washington. When he spoke, 36,058 Americans had been diagnosed with AIDS and 20,849 had died. The disease had spread to 113 countries, with more than 50,000 cases.
President Obama, don’t fail this presidential test of leadership. Sending your spokeswoman Valerie Jarrett to the HRC black-tie gala this past weekend to co-opt Dan Savage’s "It Gets Better" language to excuse your own political failures on DADT, iENDS, UAFA, and DOMA doesn’t count. Speak up yourself, Mr President — give teens hope.
Do it today.
Some LGBTQ teens don’t seem to have much hope right now. Our culture doesn’t seem to provide them with much hope.
And your lack of leadership and forceful language against homophobes is part of that. Allowing the Senate to debate DADT repeal in the starkest, most bigoted language without a response from you did not ease today’s climate of fear and despair. Allowing your Justice Department to stand aside while local law enforcement conclude ‘no lasting damage’ was caused to a beaten, bloody man with $30,000 in doctors’ bills after being bashed in Savannah doesn’t give anyone hope for your Administration’s implementation of the Shepard/Byrd Hate Crimes Law. Defending DOMA in crassly derogatory terms doesn’t help anyone think ‘we are worthy.’
Give us — give them — some hope. There’s precious little on offer lately. You remember hope, right?
It’s the only thing some of these teens have. And you can be the one who saves a life. You’re living proof it gets better for some people — now prove to every American teen they have the same chance you did for a better life.
Do it today, Mr President: please Come Out against hate.
30 Comments
Young people admire this president — they deserve to hear directly from him.
Not some proxy who drew the Joe Solmonese par-tay short straw at the White House staff meeting Friday morning.
Queer Summit, Not Beer Summit !
Great diary. This would be so easy for Obama to do and would be politically smart. We must do something to take away the pain for these young people.
Yes, indeed!
Unfortunately Teddy, you are talking about President Fierce Advocate so I’m sure you can guess the response.
“We need presidential leadership”
Unfortunately, Obama doesn’t do leadership. He does “if other people have managed to assure victory, I will step in and take part.”
But I am HOPEful of a CHANGE, dak!
Obama will likely fail this test too.
Obama wants LGBTQ money and then he wants us to SFTU and clap louder. Who knew that’s what “fierce advocate” meant?
You Would never pass it either tinman…
Fixed it for ya.
Obama is simply not capable of leadership – even if it is for something he supports. The closest thing he could do would be to give a speech saying this:
“I will not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party as your President…”
Obama is a Fierce Pickpocket
Someone needs to speak louder on the fact that homosexuality is *not* a “lifestyle choice”. People are born gay or they’re not. My gay cousin was murdered, stabbed to death, for being gay. His killer was never caught.
As long as the nut jobs are allowed to propagandize we’ll never get anywhere. There is no “Homosexual Agenda”. Gays do not recruit, they recognize. This fatal idiocy makes as much sense as refusing human rights to anyone born with red hair.
And, as for their ranting against adoption, implying or saying that gay equals pedophile….. The only pedophile I ever knew was my heterosexual uncle, may he rot in Hell.
How can he come out against hatred of gays when he espouses it?
“I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman.”
When Republican politicians justify their opposition to same sex marriage on the grounds that it makes the baby Jesus cry, we call them “bigots”.
And you know what Obama is for doing the same thing?
A bigot.
No offense Teddy, but the president doesn’t support gay rights or gay people. He might claim to support us in his speeches but he doesn’t really have a choice there because he ran as a Democrat. If you look at all of his actions, he has shown that he has a major problem with gay people and would like us to go away.
It is time for the gay community to come to grips with the fact that our Democratic president is a homophobe. There is no other explanation for his actions.
It’s as a gay person I am most bitterly disappointed in the spectacularly multidimensional FAIL of Obama.
Look, all the rest of his FAIL is understandable enough, from the mob-paycheck standpoint.
This is different. He is going out of his way to thwart the tide of history and comfort every last possible dinosaur bigot. He’s Strom Fucking Thurmond.
I don’t get it either, but he will NOT come out of his bullshit. He considers LGBT different and lesser.
Fuck him. He is irrelevant to the struggle for human rights and dignity.
Teddy,I think he has already failed the presidential test of leadership.
In every sense.
I think because Obama has a D next to his name that people have been slow to wake up to the fact that Obama is a bigot and an exploiter.
He is black after all and in the black community that is almost never spoken about… Verboten.. More shame piled on normal humans as been said it is in your birth make up or it is not. There is NO choice involved at all. Simple get over it people, these are our brothers and sisters, take care of them and always show them love and friendship. We all could use more love.
The Dems need wedge issues to differentiate themselves from the Rs, – they will never ever do the right things, the moral, ethical things, because the moment they’d do that is the moment we’d realize that they are Republicans!
I’ve long said that to know the real motivation for ANY government policy figure out who stands to profit. Obama is the personification of market/business allied neoliberalism, so his tepid to nonexistent support for LGBT rights must be motivated by economic factors, in other words how perpetuating discrimination against a large segment of the U.S. population profits his capitalist cronies.
I don’t have enough insight into the economic factors involved to list specific examples, except that I am confident much of the opposition by Obama and other pols to the cause of marriage equality hinges on the unwillingness of employers to provide benefits to same-sex spouses.
Anyway, I certainly don’t object to holding politicians to a high moral and ethical standard but since there is NO altruism in the corridors of power, to fully understand what motivates them we have to follow the money.
Well, this is a very tough issue to speak out on. There’s reams of data collected over the years that discussing suicide at all in the media INCREASES the rate of suicide, i.e. if a local news network does a story on someone killing him/herself, suicide rates in that media market go up. It makes suicide a “more acceptable” option to people already suffering.
So it would probably be bad if Obama says anything at all about teen suicide, per se, or takes notice of recent teen suicides. In fact, the widespread media reporting on that poor Rutgers kid probably helped CAUSE this spike in teen gay suicides. I know it’s sick and awful, but it’s the truth.
But, framed in more positive terms, discussing opposition to hate crimes or the promise of equality, words might help. But it’s a very tricky subject, and if the reporting on an Obama speech regurgitated all the recent teen suicides it could actually be harmful. If the media framed it as “Obama speaks out against teen suicide” and they go into detail on these poor kids, it could cost lives rather than save them.
I’m 43 and have now lived just over half of my life “out”. I don’t have children of my own, but I do have nephews and children of cousins and friends, and I’m saddened that so much remains to be done for gay kids in 2010. I survived high school, but it wasn’t easy…apparently it still isn’t. Homophobia is taught; and, if we’re not actively fighting against this, we’re helping it along.
Gaylings. Make way for them.
http://www.dranespout.com/2010/10/gaylings.html
But the piece above about attitudes in the Black community is very relevant. He may not be the spokesman, but others could come forward. The Atlanta church news has brought forward with clarity the shame that doubles down in Black churches; that needs to be addressed. Could be a good forum for a discussion and esp. for Black youth as well.
That is a very interesting comment you made. I had not thought of that, but sadly it makes some sense.
I think the problem is that Obama has little empathy.
It was interesting to watch his reaction to the woman who said that she was tired of defending him. At first, Obama had his half-smiling face on, and then, gradually, he seemed genuinely shocked at being confronted with the truth. It may be that, with the constant discussion of what sells politically going on in the white house, the matter of people’s lives and their suffering doesn’t come through very often.
Obama’s lack of empathy is probably not helped by the insular nature of the White House. But despite the on-going wars, the lack of immigration reform, the lack of adequate stimulus, this particular issue is getting to me, big-time.
How many young people need to be sacrificed before Obama does the right thing?
He won’t speak out because he doesn’t give a shit.
Why is this simple fact not clear?
Sucks.On. This.