Last month Jamie Hubley committed suicide. He was a 15-year-old student in Kanata who eloquently expressed himself online — he had a Tumblr blog, a YouTube presence, a Twitter feed — where he often talked often of his loneliness as a gay teenager.
His supportive family, who loved and accepted him whole-heartedly, released a statement that confirmed that their son had been bullied at school - a lot.
When Stevie Spiteful and his Contempt Party politicians got their Hard-On Crime Bill all fluffed up, holding bullies accountable for their actions was ^NOT a concern.
Attacking & bullying their opponents is a big part of the Con strategy for holding on to power.
Nor are they bothered by shrieeeking, religious fundamentalist zygote zealots who physically abuse their children, many of whom then direct their fury and wretchedness towards their peers.
In last Saturday's Globe & Mail, there was a thought-provoking article about lesbian families. (The author tried to make the trite template fit recent findings about children by lesbian parents. FAIL)
A series of studies in Canada and elsewhere over the past decade has found that the children of lesbians aren't just well-adjusted – they excel. On average, kids with two moms seem to be more confident and less aggressive than those raised by a mom and a dad. They are open-minded, affectionate and less susceptible to anxiety and depression. [...]
Children with same-sex parents are undoubtedly bullied. A recent survey by the legal rights group Equality for Gays And Lesbians Everywhere found that 37 per cent of these teens reported verbal harassment, and 27 per cent reported physical harassment.[...]
“It shouldn't be on our children's backs to change the culture,” says [LGBT Family Coalition of Montreal] executive director, Mona Greenbaum. “It's up to the professionals that work with our kids.”
Dr Gabor Maté has observed that ...
"the rise in bullying, ADHD and other mental disorders in American children are the result of current societal conditions - a disconnected society and "the loss of nurturing, non-stressed parenting." He asserts that nurturing adults are necessary for healthy brain development.
Indeed. I wonder what pro-active endeavours Jamie Hubley's high school teachers have undertaken since his death, to stop bullying and to prevent other teen suicides.
Un grand merci to Niles who provided a name to the scourge of christian fundamentalist child abuse.
1 comment:
I did? I mean, I did...yes, I did.
Although when it comes to the Pearls, I think they may be the latest authoritarian flavour hitting the news in the wake of child torture coming to light, at least in North America. I've read plenty of references to James Dobson and his Righteous 'discipline' guides on how to ensure no lesser creature gets uppity in a man's presence.
The Duggars of Quiverful fame preach a less publically repulsive version of submissive training, and there is even the submissive Christian wife-beating philosophy that hovers between BDSM and outright domestic slave-bot.
But all of those are 'modern' echoes of 'absolute truth on raising biddable families for a biddable society headed by roughntough males' manuals. Such training rules started getting dressed up as pseudoscience as the 1900s aged, but the core of what I've come across is always the terror of over-feminizing boys and uppityizing girls out of patriarchal strictures.
The pseudoscience 'voice of authority' angle covered off the sectors of society shrugging free of religious inconsistencies and still does to this day. 'Evolutionary-psychology' and its 'just-so' justifications of gender behaviours as hard-wired 'menz rule=wimminz drool' is an annoying case in point.
Of course, I always find it morbidly amusing the pseudoscience tracts get held up as peer-reviewed science still being embraced, by proponents of Old Testament quote-mining religions who also drag in proverbs and centuries when men held absolute legal rights to wives and children as chattel, to *prove* Goddiddit sovereignty.
There is intersection with the 99%/1% economic dynamic. Patriarchy harms (nearly) everyone forced to survive its demands.
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