Yes. I would have wished this blog title would have been different as well. News like this depresses the hell out of me and saddens me deeply. Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover an 11 year old boy from Massachusetts, a boy who had a whole life in front of him, took his own life away by hanging himself with an electrical cord on April 6th 2009.
His mother said that Carl was subjected to daily anti-gay taunts at his school, the New Leadership Charter School in Springfield, Massachusetts, and said that she had been in contact with the administration of the school for over 6 months to get them to do something about the homophobic bullying that was going on.
Amongst other things, the 11 year old was told “you’re gay, you must be gay, you act like a girl” and on the day of his suicide, the boy told his mother he was suspended for 5 days because he bumped into a girl who had verbally abused him and threatened him harm, something the school denies ever occurring.
This is yet another sad and heartbreaking piece of evidence that not only the verse ’sticks and stones may break my bones…’ is incorrect, but that the human race is still far behind on the scale of tolerance. There are so many things wrong with this piece of news that it is hard to count them on one hand…
- Schools are supposed to be a safe haven for children.
- Carl’s mother had been trying to get the school to do something about the bullying for over six months and nothing changed. The school should have been investigating the bullying since the first time the mother brought it up. Not to mention themselves keeping an eye on things that go on at their school.
- The children that were doing the bullying should have been taught better by not only the school, but more importantly their parents. And you can not convince me that they had no idea that their child wasn’t capable of these things. THERE. ARE. ALWAYS. SIGNS.
- Education people. EDUCATION! Teach people, and their children that, amongst other things, bullying is NOT okay. It doesn’t matter if you’re gay, you’re straight, a person of color, or anyone else that is considered ‘less’ in today’s society, which is bullshit anyway.
Why would it matter to you if a person is gay or not? What has this person ever done to you except be different. It doesn’t hurt you. You may THINK it hurts you, but it doesn’t. Sure you can disagree with who a person is, that is your given right to do so. But that doesn’t mean you have to bully a person just because he or she is different.
/soapbox
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