I had learned heard about Amanda Todd long after most of the to-do had blown over, but I was reminded of her when I started hearing about Rehteah Parsons, a girl who decided to end it after she was gang-raped while unconscious and humiliated with revealing photos circulated by the perpetrators. So I came across this:
You know what's strange about this "meme" is that bullying and anti-gay seem to be treated as synonyms by the press, in deference to Dan Savage's "It Get's Better." There was a kid set on fire in some stupid stunt, and it got national press -- what was the thing said about it? Possible hate crime, possible bullying.
Bullying causing teen suicides? We need training materials to teach kids that homosexuality and gay parenting is normal. That's the remedy. Not training kids that it is wrong to bully kids for any reason. I read not too long ago about a kid being mercilessly teased for being fat, and she had a rare disorder. (Must have been all those religious folks with their anti-gluttony sermons. We should outlaw sermons on gluttony as hate speech. We should teach kids that its fabulous to be fat.)
I even read about a school murder where a kid was taunted and brought a gun to school. It was the gay kid who was doing the taunting (at the encouragement, it seems, of school personnel) but it still showed up in a list of lethal anti-gay bullying episodes.
But for the most part, the hype has been about gay bullying. I didn't even hear about Amanda Todd until I came across somebody's "meme" about her.
I knew of kids that got bullied in elementary and middle school. They weren't bullied because they were effeminate. They were bullied because they seemed a little weird and seemed vulnerable. One was weird because he had Asperger's. It's well known that many kids are targeted for their ASD-related social awkwardness now but I mainly hear about is anti-gay bullying. It's that kind of bullying that matters. Bullying wasn't new when I was a kid. My mom was bullied in school (for being white) and my dad would've been bullied every day if he hadn't had a mean punch. Now teen suicide, I believe, has gone up considerably since the 60s, but being so persecuted that one wants to die is not a recent thing. And I'm not saying something shouldn't be done about it, but it's not a new problem, and it's not unique to effeminate boys or kids with same sex attractions.
I read a while back about a group of teenage miscreants who went around looking for someone to beat up. They settled on a gay person eventually, but they had tried targeting a Hispanic boy earlier. They weren't looking to purge the world of gayness. They were just looking for any excuse to say, "Well, lookie what we have here..." And this is what most bullying is about. Kids don't do it for their parents approval or to fit their parents agenda. They do it because they decide to victimize someone so they look for something that makes a victim stand out. He could just be wearing funny clothes or walking funny to show up on their radar.
This is why the use of "bullying" as a rallying cry to use state/federal authority and money to normalize homosexuality appears to be exploiting tragedies to further a political agenda. But lately, we've seen a lot of tragedy being exploited to provoke government intervention.
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/rehtaeh-parsons-amanda-todd-rcmp
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/04/17/rehtaeh-parsons-family-blasts-those-publicly-supporting-alleged-rapists/
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/04/audrie_pott_and_rehtaeh_parsons_how_should_the_legal_system_treat_nonconsensual.html
http://personalliberty.com/2013/04/18/mainstream-newspapers-fall-in-line-to-condemn-gun-grab-defeat-in-senate/
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