- A Suicide At Rutgers

I can’t imagine what college must be like with everyone videotaping everyone else, pretty much all the time. Had that been possible when I was in college, there would have been 5 suicides (and 14 murders) a week at Rutgers.

This story is really tragic. The kid’s parents didn’t know that he was gay and he was obviously not emotionally prepared to share that information with them. But his roommate and his friend took that choice away from him and it was more than he could take. It’s a terrible story, and it seems like the people who did wrong will be punished for it, but it’s important not to come to the wrong conclusions about all this.

I’ve made plain my feelings on the politics surrounding homosexuality before, but for simplicity sake let me say them again. My view is this… if it doesn’t involve someone who lives in my house, and I’m not being presented with a bill for anything the next morning, then I could not care less what anyone does in their sex life. So long as it doesn’t intrude on the issues I just mentioned, then I literally view it as none of my business. More than that, I view it as incredibly poor manners to comment on anyone else’s sex life in any way. Had the two kids being charged in this tragedy shared my view, this whole tragedy might have been avoided.

If I were to guess, I’d say that they probably didn’t think it was such a big deal. I think if they knew how it would affect the victim then they almost certainly wouldn’t have done it. After all, they had been conditioned by decades of public school indoctrination to believe that being gay is no big deal at all. As heterosexuals they probably thought it was no worse than showing video of a heterosexual boy with a girl they thought was unattractive. But to this kid and his family, it was a much bigger deal than that. It’s genuinely tragic that they didn’t have the common sense (or at least the good manners) to mind their own business.

There are probably those who think that some of the blame lies with the victim’s parents for not making it ‘OK’ for the boy to publicly proclaim his sexual preference. I think that’s exactly wrong. Anyone who commits suicide has more complicated issues than the final straw would ever lead you to believe. But even beyond that, I think that values should be taught to children by their parents and not by the state. I may not agree with the specific values being taught, but I very firmly believe that it’s their right and theirs alone. When it comes to things like that the state (and specifically the state run schools) should mind their own business as well.

The public schools have tried for 3 decades to make ‘tolerance’ a central issue. And in that vein homosexuality is considered an important protected ‘victim’ class. That has as much to do with this issue as anything. Some kids will always be insensitive jerks, and that will always reach its peak in the post adolescence of college. And it’s ironic that had these kids not been specifically conditioned to think of homosexuality as a non-issue, they might have better understood how horrified this poor kid might have been by his being ‘outed’.

But the media, academics, and intelligentsia will never frame it that way. Their ‘solution’ to this issue will be more and stronger indoctrination that further erodes the role of parents in their children’s lives. That literally will be adding insult to injury and can only lead to more trouble like this… not less.