This editorial is from the Concord Monitor in
Hanover, Vermont. Sunday, April 30, 2000
By SHARON UNDERWOOD
For the Valley News (White River Junction, VT/Hanover,
NH)
As the mother of a gay son, I've seen firsthand how cruel
and misguided people can be.
Many letters have been sent to the Valley News concerning
the homosexual menace in Vermont. I am the mother of a gay son and I've
taken enough from you good people.
I'm tired of your foolish rhetoric about the "homosexual
agenda" and your allegations that accepting homosexuality is the same thing
as advocating sex with children. You are cruel and ignorant. You have been
robbing me of the joys of motherhood ever since my children were tiny.
My firstborn son started suffering at the hands of the
moral little thugs from your moral, upright families from the time he was
in the first grade. He was physically and verbally abused from first grade
straight through high school because he was perceived to be gay.
He never professed to be gay or had any association with
anything gay, but he had the misfortune not to walk or have gestures like
the other boys. He was called "fag" incessantly, starting when he was 6.
In high school, while your children were doing what kids
that age should be doing, mine labored over a suicide note, drafting and
redrafting it to sure his family knew how much he loved them. My sobbing
17-year-old tore the heart out of me as he choked out that he just couldn't
bear to continue living any longer, that he didn't want to be gay and that
he couldn't face a life without dignity.
You have the audacity to talk about protecting families
and children from the homosexual menace, while you yourselves tear apart
families and drive children to despair. I don't know why my son is gay,
but I do know that God didn't put him, and millions like him, on this Earth
to give you someone to abuse. God gave you brains so that you could think,
and it's about time you started doing that.
At the core of all your misguided beliefs is the belief
that this could never happen to you, that there is some kind of subculture
out there that people have chosen to join. The fact is that if it can happen
to my family, it can happen to yours, and you won't get to choose.
Whether it is genetic or whether something occurs during
a critical time of fetal development, I don't know. I can only tell you
with an absolute certainty that it is inborn.
If you want to tout your own morality, you'd best come
up with something more substantive than your heterosexuality. You did nothing
to earn it; it was given to you. If you disagree, I would be interested
in hearing your story, because my own heterosexuality was a blessing I
received with no effort whatsoever on my part. It is so woven into the
very soul of me that nothing could ever change it. For those of you who
reduce sexual orientation to a simple choice, a character issue, a bad
habit or something that can be changed by a 10-step program, I'm puzzled.
Are you saying that your own sexual orientation is nothing more than something
you have chosen that you could change it at will? If that's not the case,
then why would you suggest that someone else can?
A popular theme in your letters is that Vermont has been
infiltrated by outsiders. Both sides of my family have lived in Vermont
for generations. I am heart and soul a Vermonter, so I'll thank you to
stop saying that you are speaking for "true Vermonters."
You invoke the memory of the brave people who have fought
on the battlefield for this great country, saying that they didn't give
their lives so that the "homosexual agenda" could tear down the principles
they died defending. My 83-year-old father fought in some of the most horrific
battles of World War II, was wounded and awarded the Purple Heart. He shakes
his head in sadness at the life his grandson has had to live.
He says he fought alongside homosexuals in those battles,
that they did their part and bothered no one. One of his best friends in
the service was gay, and he never knew it until the end, and when he did
find out, it mattered not at all. That wasn't the measure of the man.
You religious folk just can't bear the thought that as
my son emerges from the hell that was his childhood he might like to find
a lifelong companion and have a measure of happiness. It offends your sensibilities
that he should request the right to visit that companion in the hospital,
to make medical decisions for him or to benefit from tax laws governing
inheritance.
How dare he? you say. These outrageous requests would
threaten the very existence of your family, would undermine the sanctity
of marriage. You use religion to abdicate your responsibility to be thinking
human beings. There are vast numbers of religious people who find your
attitudes repugnant. God is not for the privileged majority, and God knows
my son has committed no sin.
The deep-thinking author of a letter to the April 12 Valley
News who lectures about homosexual sin and tells us about "those of us
who have been blessed with the benefits of a religious upbringing" asks:
"Whatever happened to the idea of striving . . . to be better human beings
than we are?" Indeed, sir, what ever happened to that?
