Towleroad says:
Three teenage girls in Kentucky allegedly attacked Cheyenne Williams, a lesbian classmate, last Friday (coincidentally, the national Day of Silence) and tried to push her off a cliff. Johnson's mother says she was attacked because she's openly gay...
Their newspaper reported that:
Williams said the three teens took her against her will to Flat Lick Falls, physically abused her and tried to push her off a cliff. Johnson said her daughter had the presence of mind to videotape the attack on her cell phone. 'There's proof on the video that this is a hate crime,' Johnson said. A hate crime is an offense motivated, in whole or in part, by bias based on race, religion, sexual orientation, disability or ethnicity/national origin, according to the FBI Web site...
These people have been charged with attempted murder and kidnapping. News like this should really surprise me but it doesn't anymore. Even as young as I am there's so much overt hatred toward gay people that it's unreal. When I was in high school there were a few openly gay people there and they got their houses and vehicles vandalized on a regular basis. They got nicknames that stuck with them all through high school. Pretty much every way you can make someone miserable, it was done to them.
I wasn't out in high school in part because of that and in part because my sister was going to ninth grade the year after I graduated and I didn't want this to happen to her because she knows me.
It really scares me that something like this isn't even jarring anymore. I think... I mean, why NOT try to push a lesbian girl off a cliff if you hate gay people? What's the harm? Society tells you gays are bad and wrong. They need to be hidden. You and your kids need to be protected from gays.
These people and their parents live in this same society we all live in. They grew up here too. The parents probably teach the kids what they learned from their parents and from society's rules. We have religions condemning gays every day and we have politicians unwilling to stand up against discrimination.
We even have a government that allows or endorses hatred of gays or at the very least it accepts treating gays as second-class citizens. When even the government says, "watch out, these people are not like you and they need stricter rules" I just don't see what stops homophobia.
The simple reality is that we all need to move to change things. We need to fight for gays to be treated like anyone else and we need to remove the stigmas from society and government. Instead of condemning gays, standing by and doing nothing, or endorsing discrimination we need to fight back. Things won't get better until everything gets better.
This stuff doesn't just "happen." Like... oooh, wonder what they could've possibly been thinking! It's obvious that they were thinking what lots of people think. What the government says and defends. They just took it too the extreme and tried to murder this girl. You know, this is what happens. Fix it.