Homophobia in Our Schools

Oxnard isn´t exactly left-coast....It´s more like Bentonville, Arkensas By-The-Sea. I think they kill you for other reasons there too....like for driving a mercedes, or being from montecito.

Oddly enough, homosexuality was much less accepted 50 years ago yet the likelyhood of this crime occurring would have been probably less likely then.

Once again, the problem is the way kids are being raised (without any sense of right and wrong) which is why we have schoolyard shootings, road rage, binge drinking, and of course this unjustified act of violence.

Acceptance is such a simple act but to withhold it can be so cruel.

I hope we can make a better world for our gay and lesbian children to live in.

but it's hardly about ordinary citizens for gay,bi,lesbian...
http://www.Biromances.com

As horrific as the death of Lawrence King is, it's not fair to lay this off as somehow the responsibility of the school. This, after all, wasn't discrimination, harassment or teasing but pre-meditated murder.

Childhood is a rough thing to get through. If kids aren't teased for their sexual orientation and gender identity, they'll be harassed for something else – weight, size, intellect, odor, attractiveness, clothes... something. It may be there's some sort of training program out there that will suck the inherent cruelty out of children faced with the daunting task of growing up, but that’s not likely.

Schools may be able to tamp down some of the childhood viciousness. And they should do all they can to insure the environment they maintain is conductive to learning by all their students. The schools, however, will not change human nature.

Murder is something well beyond the common brutality children inflict upon one another. And if a child can't discern (or doesn't know) that murder is wrong, that's not something the schools can fix.

Apparently Lawrence King wasn't a seriously screwed up kid. It seems his short life was a tough and uneasy one filled with too many foster homes and temporary support structures. But being gay and experimenting with one's identity... that's normal.

Brandon McInerney, who killed him, was (and is) the atrociously twisted child here. It wasn't a bunch of kids that killed King, but this one kid. One kid who believed he had the right or obligation to take another's life. One kid so coldhearted as to kill in front of his classmates. One kid screwed up in his own unique and unfathomable way.

[Continued]

Fortunately kids like McInerney are rare. But they're tough to identify because psychoses come in infinite varieties. If schools are lucky, they might uncover a child capable of murder before that child actually commits murder and shunt them away from others. But that's about all schools can hope to do. And sometimes – maybe even most of the time – they may not even be able or allowed to do that.

Apparently in this case McInerney's awful mind and demon impulses were triggered by King's sexuality. Would the crime have been less horrifying if McInerney had killed him for some other reason? No.

Are gay kids more "vulnerable" than others to violence? It seems so. But all kids are vulnerable to some degree. And virtually all kids are capable of violence to some degree.

The problem here was one kid capable of and ready to commit an act of extreme violence – a murderer ready to happen. Such kids are rare but they have always been and will always be among us. We should try and do everything to dissuade them from indulging their demons. But we’ll never be perfect at it. Never.

The E.O. Green School isn’t complicit in the death of Lawrence King. There’s nothing about the crime that indicates the school did anything to encourage McInerney’s intents or ratify his prejudices. And it can’t forecast every horrible thing that might possibly happen on its campus.

There isn’t a “proactive approach” that comes with any sort of guarantee. The schools could spend every day inoculating their students against homophobia and every other sort of phobia imaginable and horrors like this would still happen. There isn’t a kid in junior high school who isn’t part of an “at-risk” population and marginalized group.

Of course gay and lesbian groups should be on campuses if for no other reason than to demystify homosexuality for kids working through their own emerging sexuality. Here’s hoping groups from across the social spectrum would take the time and make the effort to help kids understand the infinite variety of people in the society within which they live.

Lawrence King is the real victim here. And the students and staff of E.O. Green are victims. Of course they aren’t victims to the extent that King is, but some of them saw him executed before their eyes. They’ll carry that forever.

It’s cruel to accuse them of complicity.

This is a response to billclausen's observation that this incident "probably" would not have occurred fifty years ago, presumably because we had a better "sense of right and wrong" then.

Fifty years ago, two midwestern teenagers went on a high-profile killing spree that left 11 people dead in two states. This was clearly recognized as a crime at the time, and it shocked the nation. Lynching black people, however, was not so high-profile and was rarely news outside the local area. Although officially a crime, it was seldom seriously investigated and the perpetrators were seldom prosecuted. Moreover, murders of gay men were not at all unknown, in spite of a climate of palpable fear which made many such killings difficult to identify. Finally, the "sense of right and wrong" that pervaded the period appears to have generated odd responses to them among those charged with upholding the law.

Here is a case from the period: In 1953, the powers that be in Miami decided that "homosexuals" were responsible for a spate of child murders (murders of little girls) that had occurred that year, and began high-profile harrassment gay beaches and bars. The rhetoric gradually escalating until letters to the editor of the paper were talking about "Shooting them all." Then, in July of 54, 19-year-olds Charles Lawrence and Lewis Killen used guns to kill William Simpson, claiming that he'd made a pass at them. In his statement to authorities, Lawrence admitted that this was a regular thing for he and Killen. They would hitch rides with homosexuals, and then rob them. This wasn't their first shooting, but it was the first time they'd actually killed the victim. The authorities responded by redoubling their attempts to shut down all gathering places for gay people, and to weed out and lock all all the 'perverts.' Moreover, the police chief warned parents that 'rolling' homosexuals and stealing their money was a common practice in the area, and that they should keep and eye on their kids becuase in the midst of all that harmeless beating and stealing, their children might also be exposed to perversion.

I am willing to bemoan the absence of decent parental discipline, civility, and respect in our society. What I will not do is sit silently while unjustified nostalgia erases the violence and incivility and disrespect that lay beneath the surface of that era's stifling conformity (now happily recalled by some as "values"). No, this problem will not clear itself up if we just become more like the people we were then. Returning to bigotry and moral rigidity will not save us.

To Alanrichard: What is your answer then to the fact that violence is exploding?

I am well aware that lynching, racism and many other injustices were WORSE in the past. What I am addressing--and it's apparently not going over well--is that we have a phenomenon going on that hasn't happened in the past, and that is kids growing up either without parents in the home, or kids growing up with parents that don't teach them right from wrong.

People cry for gun controls when there is a schoolyard shooting, but they don't address underlying societal causes. Society on the whole sit like deer standing in the middle of the road staring into the headlights of the car that's about to hit them but don't move out of the way. We talk about "Stopping the violence" with pallative approaches such as gang truces or being taught "tolerance" but all the while the overall problem with violence gets worse.

Being tolerant and calling for gang truces does not preclude looking into the past and seeing that not everything about the past was racism, sexism, homophobia, or whatever else was negative. Sadly however, people are so obssessed with escaping these things that they decide to do away with concepts such as people getting married if they have kids, as opposed to turning out kids and moving from one partner to another. Simple anthopology proves that the mores of the Free Love period have backfired. (Funny how so many of the people who advocated "Peace" and "Love" couldn't stay with their partners)

The fact is, people would just as soon do away with the ways of child-rearing and personal conduct of the past because it just simply smacks of being too old fashioned.

Ostensibly, this was a hate crime against a homosexual, but look beyond the sexual orientation and the big picture is that our society is getting more violent all the time.

How nice it would be if people could combine the positive ideals of the 1960's with the old ways that work, but sadly human nature dictates that both sides of the polemic are unlikely to embrace the positive aspects of the other.