Yet Again! Another Gay Teenager Crosses to the Other Shore

Fourteen year old Jamey Rodemeyer took his own life last Sunday night in Buffalo, New York, in response to years of bullying from his classmates at school. I've lived with the story through the week and couldn't find the words to comment on yet again another young gay teen tragedy. Words fail at this point and the only proper response seems to be one of prayerful silence and heartfelt grief. However, words fail even more profoundly when one visits Catholic 'centrist' spiritual blogs (alongside of centrist theological journals) and encounters so many words attempting to express both 'compassion' for the despairing youth as well as rationalizations and justifications for traditional Catholic Church teaching on homosexuality.   God forbid one should have to question the latter. Catholics of this persuasion need to be told that they have nothing, nothing at all, of worth to say in response to such a tragedy if they cannot recognize the complicity of their own church and its defective, disordered moral teaching in the hate which destroyed this beautiful, sensitive, promising youth. Please, please, if you have any sense of decency at all, remain silent. Your 'compassion' is so profoundly offensive and inappropriate. Fortunately, there are sufficient people commenting on the blogs and at the Buffalo News Website, who do "get it." What makes this story particularly heartbreaking is Jamey's own video for the "It Gets Better Campaign," which shows a vulnerable, broken youth struggling with heartache beyond his young capacity to endure. We are all complicit, we are all guilty, we are all shamed.

The full story here:

Jamey's You Tube Video here:

Thank you Jamey for the grace you have given us in living and in dying. May your great grandmother have embraced you at the gates of Paradise and taken you in her arms and given you all the love and acceptance so cruelly denied you here among us on earth.  We have failed you, Christians especially, but the Spirit of Love never fails.

At The River Crossing by Harry "Breaker" Morant

Oh! the quiet river-crossing
   Where we twain were wont to ride,
Where the wanton winds were to sing
   Willow branches o'er the tide.


There the golden noon would find us
   Dallying through the summer day,
All the weary world behind us -
   All it's tumult far away.


Oh! thou rides across the crossing
   Where the shallow stream runs wide,
When the sunset's beams were glossing
   Strips of sand on either side.


We would cross the sparkling river
   On the brown horse and the bay;
Watch the willows sway and shiver
   And their trembling shadows play.


When the opal tints waxed duller
   And a gray crept o'er the skies
Yet there stayed the blue sky's color
   In your dreamy dark-blue eyes.


How the sun-god's bright caresses,
   When we rode at sunet there,
Plaited among your braided tresses,
   Gleaming on your silky hair.


When the last sunlight's glory
   Faded off the sandy bars,
There we learnt the old, old story,
   Riding homeward 'neat the stars.


'Tis a memory to be hoarded -
   Oh, the foolish tale and fond!
Till another stream be forded -
   And we reach the Great Beyond.

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