Yesterday's news featured the tragic story of Tyler Clementi who committed suicide after having a video of a private sexual encounter broadcast on the internet. There was more than one diary discussing the story posted on Daily Kos. One of them was on the rec list last night. There were several comments in that diary that I found disturbing and reprehensible.
This really is not intended as a meta diary. There is nothing about these attitudes that make them peculiar to Daily Kos. There is also nothing about them that make them strictly peculiar to issues of LGBT rights.
Induced Gay Suicide at Rutgers - We have so far to go
The majority of people commenting in this diary were as saddened and disgusted by this story as I was. It is the exceptions the this predominant reaction that trouble me. Not only did they attempt to dismiss the significance of the incident and the culpability of the two perpetrators, the tone of their dismissals has that benign smugness that almost always is used to justify the outrages of privilege. Here are some examples.
I understand the anger
And I share it. But take a deep breath before lashing out.
Yes, the kid who taped it (twice) and put it on the web made a colossal error in judgment and behaved like a total asshole.
But he's a kid. They were all kids, really. Kids sometimes make mistakes. I doubt he really thought this through, and I certainly doubt that he intended anything like this result.
He bears responsibility for what he did.
But, unless he has some prior record of this sort of thing, I just don't see what will be gained by sending him and his friend to prison for years. Months? Maybe. Years? I hope not.
They will live with the knowledge of what they did for the rest of their lives.
This is a real tragedy all around.
Compassion -- even for the unthinking, idiotic asshole kids who did this.
I'll defend the roomate et al
But this kind of thing happens at college. College students play pranks on each other no matter what sexual preference they have.
I can easily see the same situation arising dealing with a strait individuals. It is entirely possible that the this was simply a cause of college antics leading to a tragic loss. This event is tragic enough without forcing sexual preference into the issue where it may not belong....
There were more and there were people defending these comments against the protest which they received.
It is a well documented reality that young gay men have a significantly higher incidence of suicide than the general public. The most plausible explanation for this is the highly negative social atmosphere in which they are forced to grow up. I think it is reasonable to assert that the stunt pulled by these two people could be anticipated to be dangerous. I would urge the attorneys prosecuting them to make full use of that point. Bullying kills people. It really is that simple.
The reason that such bullying persist is not because most bullies are exceptionally heinous monsters. It is because their behavior gets broad tacit support from the sort of people who posted the above comments. In my mind those people are accessories to a crime.
As a gay man problems faced by other gay men are particularly close to home for me. This was not a rare occurrence. There have been several others in the news recently and they have been going on forever. However, this particular attitude of attempting to justify and excuse cruelty born out of bigotry is not unique to gay issues. We see very similar attitudes in discussions about sexual assault against women and in incidents of harassment of racial minorities. These things too have been going on forever.
We live in a culture of patriarchal male privilege. There has been some erosion of its deeply embedded state over the past generation, but it still very much has the upper hand. There is an expectation that young men will do whatever they choose to avail themselves of pleasure and entertainment. This seems like such an inevitable reality to some people that they assume that those of us who are on the receiving end of their youthful exuberance have absolutely no choice but to suck it up and endure. They think that the people who are complaining about it are the ones with the real problems.
Somehow we have to find a way to make bigotry socially unacceptable. We won't accomplish that by focusing solely of the perpetrators of criminal acts. Pressure must also be applied to their apologists and supporters.