A mother's letter to a Vermont newspaper:
This editorial is from Sunday's Concord Monitor.
Sunday, April 30, 2000
By SHARON UNDERWOOD
For the Valley News (White River Junction,
VT/Hanover, NH)
As the mother of a gay son, I've seen first hand
how cruel and misguided people can be.
Many letters have been sent to the Valley News
concerning the homosexual menace in Vermont. 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 "***"
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 that
people have chosen to join. The fact is that if it
can happen to my family, it can happen to yours, and you won't
get to choose. 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 has
been infiltrated by outsiders. Both sides of my family have lived
in Vermont for generations. I am heart and soul a
Vermonter, 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. My 83-year-old father fought
in some of the most
horrific battles of World War II, was wounded and
awarded the Purple Heart.
He shakes his head in sadness 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.
You religious folk just can't bear the thought that
as my son emerges fromthe hell that was his
childhood he might like to find a lifelong
companion and have a measure of happiness. It
offends your sensibilities
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.
How dare he? you say. 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. There are vast numbers of
religious people
who find your attitudes repugnant. God is not for
the privileged majority,
and God knows my son has committed no sin.
The deep-thinking author of a letter to the April
12 Valley News 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?" Indeed, sir, what ever
happened to that?
Sharon Underwood lives in White River Junction, Vt.
It really does'nt effect me because 1)-i'm hetero & 2)- i'm an athiest. So, if i wanted to get married, it would probably be in front of a judge anyway. Does that seem rational ?What are your thoughts about this ?
