Unfinished Lives

Remembering LGBT Hate Crime Victims

Another Tennessee Gay Teen Bullied to Death

Phillip Parker, 14: Bullied for being gay, he felt life was not worth living.

Gordonsville, Tennessee – The body of a 14-year-old gay boy was found by his parents and grandparents Friday, along with a suicide note begging his mother to help him. Phillip Parker committed suicide after being relentlessly bullied for his sexual orientation at Gordonsville High School. WSMV reports that Parker’s parents learned the magnitude of the bullying problem in the school only after he took his life.

This latest gay teen suicide takes place in a state riven with anti-gay controversy.  Recent “Don’t Say Gay,” “License to Bully,” and anti-transgender “Bathroom” bills are making their way through the Tennessee State Legislature, all attempting to stigmatize and debase LGBTQ people. Correlations have been made between high profile anti-gay news stories and a heightened number of violent incidents involving LGBTQ people around the nation.

Young Phillip was the person most likely to tell friends they were beautiful.  His mom said he was energetic, loving, fun, and happy.  But his grandmother reported to WSMV that he confided to her that he was burdened by the bullying, “like he had a big rock on his chest.”  The family said they had complained about the bullying to school officials, but the problem only got worse.

News 5 reports that over a hundred contacts with the Parker family after Phillip’s death added details to the bullying situation at the school. The family said some of these stories showed just how obvious the anti-gay bullying had become there.  His grandfather, Paul Harris, said to News 5: “Because he was gay, he got mistreated physically, mentally by several people out there at the school, and I am very resentful as a result of it. A sweet kind person like Phillip took it out on himself, he killed himself to get out of the pain.” 

No cause of death has yet been officially released by law enforcement authorities.  School officials have not returned calls for comment to the press.

January 23, 2012 Posted by | Anglo Americans, Anti-LGBT hate crime, anti-LGBT hate crime murder, Bullycide, Bullying in schools, gay teens, GLBTQ, Hate Crimes, Heterosexism and homophobia, LGBTQ, LGBTQ suicide, Tennessee, transphobia | , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Our Pets are First Victims of Right-Wing Hate: Response to Arkansas Cat Murder

Pet cat killed because of hate. Picture provided by Blue Arkansas who wrote: "It is included here not for shock value, but to show just how heinous some people can be."

Russellville, Arkansas – Jake Burris, campaign manager for Democratic Congressional candidate Ken Aden, came home with his four children to find their pet cat slaughtered on the front porch.  “LIBERAL” was scrawled in magic marker on the lifeless body. In a clear example of terrorism, the innocent animal had been bashed in the head and left so that it could not be missed by Burris, who is locked in a tight campaign struggle against a right-wing Republican opponent to elect his candidate to the U.S. House of Representatives.  But instead of Burris finding the carcass of the family pet before his children, his little boy found their kitty first.  Blue Arkansas wrote movingly about this atrocity:

“This is terrorism.  There’s no other word for it.  A police report has been filed.  Jake said the kids seem to be handling it okay.  The one that discovered the cat was too young to be able to read and Jake had quickly gotten the others into the house before they saw it.  Pope County is an insanely conservative area and the Aden campaign has been shaking things up even there and it looks like another right wing sociopath with a taste for violence has come crawling out of the woodwork in response.  I asked Aden for a comment on the record:

‘“This is sickening.  To kill a child’s pet…I’m at a loss for words…I’ve seen the best and the worst of humanity, but this is something else.”’

Defenseless, innocent victims pay the price of hate ideology and violence first–our pets.  Violence against human victims is underreported, but statistics on this dimension of hate violence are non-existent. The numbers of pets slain in hate killings must be astronomical. Political liberals, progressives, LGBTQ people, women, racial/ethnic minorities have all experienced the terrible shock, anger, and raw fear Jake Burris and his family faced yesterday at the hands of irrational hate groups who send a message of terror by killing cats, dogs, birds and other family pets.

The murder of pet animals is often a prelude to anti-human violence.  Gay man Charlie Howard found his cat dead on the front steps of his apartment in Bangor, Maine with its neck broken shortly before a gang of Bangor’s youth threw him off the State Street Bridge. Friends of Charlie’s said that after he found his cat killed, he became depressed and fearful. He had every reason to be, as it turned out. Charlie drowned in Kenduskeag Stream because three boys hated him because of his sexual orientation.  The pet killing was a telegraphic message of homophobia, sent from people who warmed up to killing Charlie by taking the life of his companion.

I know the feeling that terrorized Charlie Howard and that the Jake Burris and his family face now.  In the early 1990’s, I came home from pastoral hospital visits to parishioners to find my English Bulldog Buck and my Basset Hound Beau butchered, hanging up in a tree in my Eastern NC parsonage yard.  Anonymous opponents suspected I was gay, and tried to drive me out of the church I was serving by slaughtering my pets.  In those days, I lived a single, closeted life, serving churches with the fear of discovery of my sexual orientation. My dogs were my only companions, and paid the ultimate price because cowards thought I would run.  I did not run.  I stayed at the church and fought back successfully.  But the loss is still with me.

Reuters reports that the campaign of Republican incumbent Steve Womack, Aden’s opponent in the heavily conservative 3rd District of Arkansas, has condemned the killing of Burris’s cat.  Candidate Aden and Burris said they do not believe anyone in the Womack campaign perpetrated the crime.  The Russellville Police Department is treating this incident as an animal cruelty case, and the investigation is ongoing. But the fact remains that the atmosphere of irrational hatred propounded by unreasoning prejudice is lethal.

Jake Burris told Blue Arkansas, “I’ve got a gun and I know how to use it. If I have to protect my kids I’ll do it without hesitation.”  

We have a duty to all life to find a cure for hate.  Our pets pay as terrible a price as we do because of hate violence.  Perhaps the shock of a story like this can awaken the consciences of our neighbors to work with us to create a world safe for all creatures to live without fear.    ~ Stephen V. Sprinkle, Founder and Director of the Unfinished Lives Project, Associate Prof at Brite Divinity School, Fort Worth, Texas

January 23, 2012 Posted by | Anti-LGBT hate crime, anti-LGBT hate crime murder, Arkansas, gay men, GLBTQ, Hate Crimes, Heterosexism and homophobia, LGBTQ, Perpetrators of Hate Crime, Pet killings, Slurs and epithets, Special Comments, transphobia, U.S. House of Representatives | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Our Pets are First Victims of Right-Wing Hate: Response to Arkansas Cat Murder

Anti-Gay Hate Groups Protest Southern Poverty Law Center—For Intolerance!

Anti-gay hate groups and a few Black pastors protest outside SPLC offices last week.

Montgomery, Alabama – A dozen African American ministers and representatives of anti-gay hate groups listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) picketed and protested in front of the justice organization’s headquarters in Montgomery, according to a post by the SPLC.  Stung by being listed publicly as anti-gay hate groups because of many documented instances of spreading falsehoods and demonizing gay LGBTQ people, these groups are hitting back at the respected civil rights watchdog organization, calling its Intelligence Report campaign to expose anti-gay bigotry “lies” and part of a “liberal plot” to undermine the American family. Black Entertainment National News (BET) reported that the participation of African American pastors protesting the civil rights organization was “ironic.”

Liberty Counsel’s Matt Barber, a well-financed cadre of right-wing attorneys affiliated with Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Baptist University and Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, said: “The SPLC has moved from monitoring actual hate groups like the KKK and neo-Nazis to slandering mainstream Christian organizations with that very same hate group label.” Barber went on to charge that “billions” of Jewish and Christian people were being “smeared” by the SPLC as hateful because they teach traditional Judeo-Christian values.  Members of widely-known anti-gay hate organizations such as AFTAH, Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, and Abiding Truth Ministries also spoke.  The themes they and their African American clergy supporters sounded at a press conference related to the protests included charges of unfairness, hating God, and spreading lies about these groups, all as instruments of “pro-gay politicking.” 

SPLC’s Mark Potok, editor of the Intelligence Report, swiftly refuted the accusations of attacking these hate groups for their Christian or Jewish faith. Potok said, “Our listing of anti-gay hate groups is completely unrelated to religion, Christianity or the Bible. These groups are listed because they repeatedly lie in an effort to defame LGBT people, an exercise they’ve been extraordinarily successful at. The idea that we are criticizing these groups because they represent Judeo-Christian morality is simply ludicrous.”  Examples of the efforts to stigmatize and defame LGBTQ people by these groups include trumped up charges that gay men are largely pedophiles who prey on the young, are sex-addicted, and instigated the Holocaust against the Jews of Europe.

Abiding Truth Ministries founder, Scott Lively, who has actively sought to foment anti-gay attitudes in nations of the former Soviet Union and Sub-Saharan Africa, sent a written appeal to God to eliminate the SPLC.  Lively’s statement, read at the protest press conference, said, “My prayer, as one who really does hate irrational prejudice, is that the Lord by His sovereign power will remove this dangerous, hate-spreading organization from our nation and cause its leaders and members to repent for their wickedness. … I want to make clear that I am asking God himself to destroy their organization.”  Box Turtle Bulletin, a blog founded to monitor news affecting the LGBTQ community worldwide, maintains a massive dossier on Scott Lively’s hate mongering activities and statements, which can be accessed here.

The SPLC’s Winter 2010 issue of the Intelligence Report lists 18 anti-gay hate groups and their propaganda.  The award-winning  quarterly magazine gives comprehensive research updates on hate groups to law enforcement agencies, the media, and the general public. According to its Intelligence Files, “Opposition to equal rights for gays and lesbians has been a central theme of Christian Right organizing and fundraising for the past three decades – a period that parallels the fundamentalist movement’s rise to political power.”

In response to the threat of divine retribution for labeling anti-gay hate organizations for what they are, the SPLC said that if the firebombing by the Ku Klux Klan did not destroy the organization, it is doubtful that anti-gay hate groups will have any better luck.

January 23, 2012 Posted by | Alabama, Anti-Gay Hate Groups, GLBTQ, hate speech, Heterosexism and homophobia, KKK, LGBTQ, Protests and Demonstrations, Social Justice Advocacy, Southern Poverty Law Center, transphobia | , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

   

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