The Best Thing I've Read All Year Published on May 04, 2000 Sunday, April 30, 2000 By SHARON UNDERWOOD For the Valley News (White River Junction, VT)
I am the mother of a gay son and I've taken
enough from you good people.
I'm tired of
your foolish rhetoric about the
"homosexual agenda"
and your allegations that accepting
homosexuality is the same thing as advocating
sex with children.
You are cruel and ignorant.
You have been robbing me of the joys of
motherhood ever since my children were tiny.
My firstborn son started suffering at the hands
of the moral little thugs from your moral,
upright families from the time he was in the
first grade.
He was physically and verbally abused from
first grade straight through high
school because he was perceived to be gay.
He never professed to be gay or had any
association with anything gay,
but he had
the misfortune not to walk or have gestures
like the other boys.
He was called
"fag"
incessantly, starting when he was 6.
In high school, while your children were doing
what kids that age should be doing,
mine
labored over a suicide note,
drafting and
redrafting it
to be sure his family knew how much he loved
them.
My sobbing 17-year-old tore the heart out
of me as he choked out that he just couldn't
bear to continue living any longer,
that he didn't want to be gay
and that he couldn't face a life
without dignity.
You have the audacity to talk about protecting
families and children from the homosexual
menace,
while you yourselves tear apart families
and drive children to despair.
I don't know why my son is gay,
but I do
know that God didn't put him,
and millions like him, on this
Earth to give you someone to abuse.
God gave you brains so that you could think,
and it's about time you started doing that.
At the core of all your misguided beliefs
is the belief that this could never happen to
you,
that there is some kind of subculture out there
The fact is that if it can happen to my
family,
Whether it is genetic
or whether something
occurs during a critical time of fetal
development,
I don't know.
I can only tell you
with an absolute certainty that it is inborn.
If you want to tout your own morality,
you'd
best come up with something more substantive
than your heterosexuality.
You did nothing to
earn it;
it was given to you.
If you
disagree,
I would be interested in hearing your
story,
because my own heterosexuality was a blessing I
received with no effort whatsoever on my part.
It is so woven into the very soul of me that nothing could ever change it.
For those of you who reduce
sexual orientation to a simple choice,
a character issue, a bad habit
or something that
can be changed by a 10-step program,
I'm
puzzled.
Are you saying that your own sexual
orientation
is nothing more than something you have
chosen,
that you could change it at will?
If that's not the case, then why would you suggest that someone else can?
A popular theme in your letters is that Vermont
I am heart and soul a Vermonter,
My 83-year-old father fought in
some of the most horrific
battles of World War II,
He shakes his head in sadness
You religious folk just can't bear the thought
It offends your sensibilities
How dare he? you say.
There are vast numbers of religious people
The deep-thinking author
of a letter to the April 12 Valley News
Indeed, sir, what ever happened to that?
Knowledge without practice is but half a person
- English Proverb
has been infiltrated by outsiders.
so I'll thank you to stop saying that you are
speaking for
"true Vermonters."
You invoke the memory of the
brave people
who have fought on the battlefield
for this great country,
saying that they didn't
give their lives so that the
"homosexual
agenda"
could tear down the principles they
died defending.
was wounded and
awarded the Purple Heart.
at the life his grandson has had to
live.
He says he fought alongside homosexuals
in those battles,
that they did their part and bothered no one.
One of his best friends in the service was
gay,
and he never knew it until the
end,
and when he did find out, it mattered not
at all.
That wasn't the measure of the man.
that as my son emerges from the hell that was
his
childhood
he might like to find a lifelong
companion
and have a measure of happiness.
that he should request the right to visit that
companion in
the hospital,
to make medical decisions for him
or to benefit from tax laws governing
inheritance.
These outrageous requests
would threaten the very existence of your
family,
would undermine the sanctity of
marriage.
You use religion to abdicate your
responsibility
to be thinking human beings.
who find your attitudes repugnant.
God is not for the privileged majority,
and God knows my son has committed no sin.
who lectures about homosexual sin
and tells us about
"those of us who have been blessed with
the benefits of a religious upbringing"
asks: "What ever happened to the idea of
striving . .
.
to be better human beings than we are?"