Today I'm bringing you the one and only installment of the Abbreviated Asshole Round-Up. Throughout the last week, I've seen a few opinion pieces on Tyler Clementi's death that have been unusually cruel and unnecessary. Some people are just not content until they kick others when they're down.
First up is an editorial suggesting that the bullied gay kid who'd just had an intimate, private moment broadcast all over the internet could have just decided to make a different choice:
Other choices Clementi could have made: Embracing his loss of privacy and working for or founding an organization for gay teens, or on ethics and privacy in the Internet age. He could have sued Ravi and Wei, and made their names as famous as his own, and a symbol of consequences for vicious behavior. I suspect there would have been no shortage of pro-bono lawyers eager to take the case.
We don't think clearly when we're in great pain. That too is natural. But if Clementi had resisted the urge to end it all, today we'd be having a conversation about ethics and privacy, not about death.
Yes, this person is now bullying a dead guy for not making a sane and well-reasoned choice in the midst of someone ripping his world away a month after he moved off to college. The opinion piece then goes on to suggest that things can always get worse (i.e. Tyler was just a whiner who killed himself because he thought things were so bad.)
And if you ratchet it up from animals to humans, there's no end to the cruelty. If not much is happening today, just go back a few days. Or read a history book. Pick any century. Pick any decade. It's difficult to come away from that experiment with much respect for human nature.
Next up we have an opinion piece telling us that, I kid you not, there is not a trend of gay suicides. The editorial uses fundamentally weak and incorrect statistics, even assuming at one point that the statistics for gays and heterosexuals are equal, to say that gay suicides aren't up. And by "assuming" that all statistics are equal, it discounts the fact that LGBT people are 3 to six times more likely to kill themselves. Observe:
Yet does his awful death mean there’s a "trend" of suicides by young gays and lesbians. That has been a television theme in the last week. It’s clear there have been suicides in which young homosexuals kill themselves at least in part owing to harassment. Each instance is heartbreaking. But people who aren’t gay, or don’t belong to any group that has been subjected to prejudice, take their own lives. Does the occurrence of a gay person’s suicide show any larger trend?
In 2007, there were about 42 million Americans aged 15-24. The self-inflicted death rate for this group was about one in 10,300. That comes to roughly 4,000 suicides a year by those of teens-to-college age — a horrible figure. That suicide is a leading cause of death for young people is, itself, horrible.
The exact figure is disputed, but a good estimate is that three to four percent of the human family is homosexual. Based on the suicide rate for those 15 to 24, we’d expect somewhere around 150 gay or lesbian young people to kill themselves in a year. That’s terrible – but also shows a few instances of gay suicide do not constitute a trend. This ABC News report laments "five suicides by gay teenagers in the last three weeks," implying a sudden new development. Other things being equal, statistics would suggest nine suicides by gay young adults in a three-week period.
It goes on to rationalize gay suicide by suggesting things like, straight people who are rejected by their families are likely to commit suicide too, to paraphrase.
And last up, media and the gays have exploited a random guy's random death completely unconnected to LGBT issues or anything of the sort, in order to further their big and probably dangerous agendas:
A crowd of more than 20 people ended up lying outside the entrance of the Rutgers Student Center on the College Avenue campus the first night of the news breaking. The chants were, "We're here. We're queer. We want safety in our homes." The mistake was that Clementi's death should not have been turned into a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender protest for gay rights and safe spaces at the University. Robert O'Brien, Department of Anthropology assistant instructor, led the rally as he chanted, "Not safe in dorms, not safe at Rutgers." Essentially, an angry mob fending for their rights turned the death of a young boy into a cause for "safe spaces" for gays across the University - all the while, these spaces already existed. We have groups across campus that deal with students' psychological difficulties - 17 Seconds is one that deals with suicides - as well as groups that address their sexual orientation. We have these spaces, and the University community is diverse enough to provide students with whatever it is they need.
The focal point of Clementi's tragic death should have been a boy's inability to deal with the hardships of life. And yet the news and certain organizations picked this up and carried it into the ranks of general causes for major social groups - for their profit. Did Tyler really feel unsafe after all? Do we know the reason behind his suicide? Do we know if he, himself, would take part in the movement behind his death - the push for safe spaces?
This one also goes on to suggest that being gay is not the only reason someone kills themselves. Oddly enough it neglects to explain away the fact that it happened right after a same-sex sexual encounter was broadcast all over the internet. Once again they're trying to erase anything gay from the equation and "equate" gay suicide with heterosexual suicide. I don't know why they're doing this.
I only excerpted quotes from those pieces - people should read all of them.