The death toll of LGBT youth who have had their lives and psyches destroyed by fundamentalist Christianist inspired anti-gay hate. The latest victim that we know of is 19 year old EricJames Borges who had been subjected to an exorcism by his parents and then kicked out of their home. While I never experienced anything like EricJames, one of the most difficult things in my coming out journey was ridding myself of the toxic religious brainwashing I had been raised with. Some of us never fully get over the psychological damage done to us by religion. Andrew Sullivan sums up this latest tragedy very well in a post entitled "My Name Was Not Eric. It Was Faggot":
Eric - after making this video and struggling to overcome the impact of this psychological and physical warfare against him - killed himself two days ago at the age of 19. His own mother had tried to exorcize the gayness out of him. His own mother.
You want to know why so many of us are so impassioned to change the world that effectively killed this human being, made in the image of God? To love and save the Erics of today, and to prevent the laws and culture that reduce him - and all that he is - to the word "faggot." And this is a task real Christians need to be in the vanguard of, rather than adding to the pain and torture that seeps into the lives of so many, so young, and so vulnerable.
Why is that so hard to understand? Can anyone doubt where Jesus would be in this battle?
The following is the "It Gets Better" video that EricJames made which tells the story of how he was raised in a Christian extremist household and was kicked out of his parents’ home. Sadly, it did not get better for EricJames - and I suspect there are many, many more EricJames that we never hear about.
What was done to EricJames was unadulterated child abuse. Yet his parents will suffer no repurcussions.
And as for the "real Christians" that Andrew Sullivan refers to, most do nothing and sit on their hands because they fear disrupting parish or denominational unity. My own ELCA parish is as guilty of this as are so many others. Doing what's right often means rocking the boat and offending the sensibilities of hypocrites, bigots and modern day Pharisees. As I have noted many times before, often bad things happen because good people do nothing to stop it.
No comments:
Post a Comment