(Chatham, Evanston, and Chicago) and all in the month of February of this year. The following two are 11 year old's Carl Walker-Hoover and Jaheem Herrera. The mother's of both children, Sirdeaner L. Walker (Left) and Masika Bermudez (Right), appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show yesterday.
Both children faced severe bullying from students and often received anti-gay slurs. As a child, I was always taught that is someone ever bothered you in school, you should tell the teacher and have them take care of it. I can speak from experience saying that this method more often than naught, did not work. In fact, it just added another label for the children to harass you with: "tattle-tail".Carl too saught protection from the daily verbal abuse by his peers, but the school administration was unable to help in the end. Carl's mother said, "He was so afraid that he ate lunch with a guidance counselor." On April 6, 2009, Carl came home after an upsetting incident at school. "This is what Carl told me. He said that his backpack had hit the TV stand and that the TV stand hit a girl," Sirdeaner says. "The girl got really upset and threatened to beat him."
Sirdeaner says Carl was afraid he'd receive a suspension. "I tried to reassure Carl," she says. "He just went quietly up to his room, and I continued making dinner." This was the last time Sirdeaner would see her son alive. After she finished preparing dinner, she went to check on her son Carl only to find him hanging from the stair banister with an extension cord around his neck.
Carl also left a note, but Sirdeaner says it did not say why he chose to take his life. In the note, Sirdeaner says Carl left his favorite toy to his sister. "He told everybody that, you know, he loved them very much. He said he was very sorry," she says. "He was looking out for his younger brother, Charles, and he didn't want him to have a difficult time."Jaheem Herrera has a similar story. Jaheem liked to dance and sing and draw, and he was often called "gay" from students because of it. Telling the teachers only got him more teasings from the students being labeled a "snitch" and "tattle-tale". On April 16, 2009, Jaheem came home in a good mood. He showed his mother his report card with good grades on it. They gave each other a high five and the mother began to cook dinner. Shortly after, Jaheem's sister told him that some more kids were calling him "gay" in school.
Masika, Jaheem's mom, said, "He got upset. I sent him upstairs. He usually [goes] upstairs and plays with his toys and gets over it." Sadly, that was not the case this time. When Masika went upstairs to tell her son dinner was ready, she discovered her son hanging in his room with a cloth around his neck. Masika says Jaheem left no note. "He just did it," she says. "Now I won't have my boy child. That was my only boy child."This immigrant family from the Virgin Islands said that Jaheem never received this kind of treatment in school until they came to the United States. That in itself should tell you something about the state of our school system. Jaheem's friends recounted something that happened earlier the day before he committed suicide: "Jaheem asked if anyone would miss him if he wasn’t here." His friend replied, "I am your friend and I would miss you."
Both families have hired lawyers to look into the school's administration and find out why not enough was done to curb the bullying that lead to the deaths of these two boys. A similar story is that of Ryan Halligan. Ryan was a 13 year old boy who was constantly bullied (mostly through the internet) and called "gay" and "faggot".
He was often attacked through instant messages and e-mails. A girl he had expressed interest in faked conversations online with him just so she could get personal information from him to make fun of him later about. After he came up to her in school, she called him a "loser" and told him he was just pretending to like him. He then responded, "It's girls like you who make me want to kill myself."
Ryan had hoped that this girl would become his girlfriend and the other kids would stop making fun of him. On October 7, 2003, Ryan's sister found Ryan hanging in bathroom early that morning. He was 13 years old when he died. The reason this case isn't one of the five listed above is not clear to me, but it is one of the cases listed under cyber-bullying. Below is a video with Ryan's parents recounting their tragic experiences.I find it ludicrous that the people who oppose same-sex marriage use the old saying, "Won't anybody think of the children?" That's my point exactly. By creating dissent and division on the topic, children are effected by it. The term "gay" has become a word that no longer means being homosexual, but it has taken a destructive form that has only a negative meaning which children are using against each other usually for reasons not associated to sexual orientation. Also, at the age that Carl and Jaheem were at, they more than likely have not even come to develop their sense of self yet, let alone figure out their sexual orientation.
New York Times bestseller Judith Warner says, "Being called a 'fag,' you see, actually has almost nothing to do with being gay. It’s really about showing any perceived weakness or femininity – by being emotional, seeming incompetent, caring too much about clothing, liking to dance or even having an interest in literature."
So I repeat, why don't YOU think of the children? The hate you show to others is being inherited by your children. Your anti-gay sentiment is not only destroying the present, but also destroying the future. I hope that all you people out there never have to go through what the families of Carl, Jaheem, Ryan, and all the other kids who committed suicide had to go through. How would it feel to be the mother, father, sister or brother of a young boy or girl and to find their dead body hanging inside some room, dead. Think about that next time you spew your hatred because there always little children ears listening, including those that are no longer with us.
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