Source+7

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/sexandgender/3479/why_anti-gay_bullying_is_a_theological_issue


 * Suicide happens for numerous reasons.
 * Some seek relief from enduring physical and psychological pain that seems infinitely unrelenting and others after severe bouts of depression.
 * The pain they(students from the article) faced had an external source: the cruel, unremitting, merciless pounding of daily humiliation, taunting, harassment, and violence.
 * These suicides are not acts of “escape,” or a “cop-out” from facing life. When LGBT people resort to suicide, they are responding to far more than the pain of a few individual insults or humiliating occurrences.
 * When LGBT people commit suicide it is an extreme act of resistance to an oppressive and unjust reality in which every LGBT person is always and everywhere at risk of becoming the target of violence solely because of sexual orientation or gender identity.
 * They are acts of resistance to a perceived reality in which a lifetime of violence and abuse seems utterly unavoidable.
 * This is what Iris Marion Young terms “systematic violence” in her famous “Five Faces of Oppression.” It is a violence of //instrumentality//—violence with the effect of keeping an entire group subjugated and in a state of oppression.
 * Young argues, “Members of some groups live with the knowledge that they must fear random, unprovoked attacks on their persons or property, which have no motive but to damage, humiliate, or destroy the person”.
 * **The only thing one must do to become victimized is to be a member of a particular group (e.g. to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender). We must widen our perspective from individual acts of bullying and violence to the instrumental purpose these serve in subjugating LGBT people to particular religious and cultural ideologies in which reality is defined from a strictly heterosexual perspective—and gay and lesbian people become non-persons.
 * It is no longer an unquestioned assumption that heterosexual experience represents the definition of reality for all people.
 * The power to define reality for the masses is at stake and this power comes with all manner of political and ideological implications.
 * While a majority of LGBT people may avoid ever becoming the victim of a violence, none will be able to avoid the psychic terror that is visited upon LGBT people with each reminder that this world is one in which people are maimed and killed because of their sexual and gender identities.
 * It is this psychic terror that makes life so difficult for many LGBT people. It is this psychic terror that does the heavy lifting of instrumental, systematic violence. It intends to silence and to destroy from within.
 * If anti-gay bullying has, at any level, an embodied undercurrent of tacit theological legitimation, then we simply cannot circumvent our responsibility to provide a clear, decisive, theological response.
 * Our children and teenagers are being held hostage by a religious and political rhetoric that strives to maintain the status quo of anti-gay heterosexist normativity.