We saw thousands pack an auditorium to memorialize the pretty straight white girl who was murdered by her Sunday School teacher. Tragic to be sure. But many of us didn't even hear this story unless we were listening to Michelangelo Signorile on OutQ radio:
From the Washington Blade:
SPRINGFIELD, Mass. — The mother of an 11-year-old Massachusetts boy who killed himself after enduring anti-gay bullying at school is calling on schools to end such harassment.
Sirdeaner Walker told WCVB television in Boston that school officials shouldn’t tolerate bullying. Walker’s son, Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, died April 6 after hanging himself with an extension cord.
“I just want to help some other child,” she told the station. “I know there are other kids being picked on, and it’s day in and day out.”
Eliza Byard, executive director of the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network, supported Walker’s call for action.
“As we mourn yet another tragedy involving bullying at school, we must heed Ms. Walker’s urgent call for real, systemic, effective responses to the endemic problem of bullying and harassment,” she said. Byard noted that students who don’t identify as gay, such as Walker-Hoover, continue to face such bullying.
“From their earliest years on the school playground,” she said, “students learn to use anti-LGBT language as the ultimate weapon to degrade their peers.”
Would anyone like to speculate about why these two cases were treated so differently?
See Local ABC News coverage
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