I am glad to see that Ellen DeGeneras who has a huge number of viewers is speaking out about the murder of 15-year-old Lawrence King, which I have posted about previously. For new readers, Larry was killed by a classmate for being gay. Saying that “we must change our country,” Ellen urged her audience to “check on who you’re voting for” to see if they stand for gay rights. As I have said before, the constant venom spewed by the Christian Right slowly buy surely creates an atmosphere where Christianist bigots and others come to have a mindset where it is acceptable to kill and use other forms of violence against gays. It's horrible and it's sick, yet the main street media lacks the balls to lay responsibility at the feet of people like Mike Huckabee and other self-righteous false Christians. The law prevents one from yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, but no one stops the haters from doing the equivalent thing when it comes to engendering hatred towards LGBT citizens. I salute Ellen for saying what she did. here are highlights from Think Progress (http://thinkprogress.org/2008/02/29/ellen-we-must-change-our-countrys-attitudes-towards-gays/):I need to talk to you about something that’s really serious and really sad. And, if you know me it’s hard to talk about sad stuff without getting emotional but this is really important to talk about. On February 12th an openly gay 15 year-old boy named Larry, (King) who was an 8th grader in Oxnard, California was murdered by a fellow 8th grader, named Brandon. Larry was killed because he was gay. Days before he was murdered, Larry had asked his killer to be his Valentine.
I don’t want to be political. This is not political. I’m not a political person, but this is personal to me. A boy has been killed and a number of lives have been ruined. And, somewhere along the line the killer, Brandon got the message that it’s so threatening so awful and so horrific that Larry would want to be his Valentine, that killing Larry seemed to be the right thing to do. And when the message out there is so horrible that to be gay, you can get killed for it, we need to change the message.
Larry was not a second-class citizen. I am not a second-class citizen. It’s ok if you’re gay. I don’t care what people say; I don’t care what people think. I know there are entire groups of people who face discrimination every single day and I know we are a long way from treating each other equally.
All of it is unacceptable. All of it. But I would like you to start paying attention to how often being gay is the punch line of a monologue or how often gay jokes are in a movie. And that kind of message, laughing at someone because they’re gay is just the beginning. It starts with laughing at someone, and then it’s verbal abuse, then it’s physical abuse, and it’s this kid Brandon killing a kid like Larry.
We must change our country, and we can do it. We can do it with our behavior; we can do it with the messages that we send our children. We can do it with our vote. This is an election year and there’s a lot of talk about change. I think one thing we should change is hate. Check on who you’re voting for. Does that person really truly believe that we are all equal under the law? If you’re not sure, I say change your vote. We deserve better.
My heart goes out to everybody involved on this horrible, horrible incident. All the families, even Brandon’s life has changed because he did this.
NOTE: A video of Ellen's comments can be seen on Think Progress or on Ellen's web site: http://ellen.warnerbros.com/2008/02/a_tragedy_that_should_never_ha.php
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