Rolling Stone on Suicide Epidemic in Anoka-Hennepin School District: Pro-Life Voice Still Silent

I wrote yesterday,

. . . [H]ow do any religious leaders (and educated, purportedly morally sensitive people who defend them) possibly imagine that they can be thought of as pro-life when we in the U.S. have been living through an epidemic of suicides of young people who are gay or gender-questioning in recent years?  And when the pro-life bishops and their educated defenders are simply silent about this phenomenon?

Here's Sabrina Rubin Erdely writing in Rolling Stone about the Anoka-Hennepin school district in Minnesota, Michelle Bachmann's home district, where nine young people took their lives in two years, and four can be proven to have been gay or perceived as gay and taunted as if they were gay:

Sam's [i.e., Samantha Johnson's] death lit the fuse of a suicide epidemic that would take the lives of nine local students in under two years, a rate so high that child psychologist Dan Reidenberg, executive director of the Minnesota-based Suicide Awareness Voices of Education, declared the Anoka-Hennepin school district the site of a "suicide cluster," adding that the crisis might hold an element of contagion; suicidal thoughts had become catchy, like a lethal virus. "Here you had a large number of suicides that are really closely connected, all within one school district, in a small amount of time," explains Reidenberg. "Kids started to feel that the normal response to stress was to take your life." 

There was another common thread: Four of the nine dead were either gay or perceived as such by other kids, and were reportedly bullied. The tragedies come at a national moment when bullying is on everyone's lips, and a devastating number of gay teens across the country are in the news for killing themselves. Suicide rates among gay and lesbian kids are frighteningly high, with attempt rates four times that of their straight counterparts; studies show that one-third of all gay youth have attempted suicide at some point (versus 13 percent of hetero kids), and that internalized homophobia contributes to suicide risk.

Note to American Catholic bishops and their supporters: you don't get to call yourself pro-life when you remain silent about this significant threat to life in the U.S.  And when you active promote "pro-life" political leaders who encourage the cultural climate that is causing gay or gender-questioning young people to kill themselves.

(H/t to Timothy Kincaid at Box Turtle Bulletin for the link to Erdely's article.)

The graphic is a photograph of Samantha Johnson from her obituary.