In Memoriam: Jamey Rodemeyer

A not-to-be-missed posting about the tragic suicide of  Buffalo teen Jamey Rodemeyer a week ago: Jayden Cameron's latest posting at Gay Mystic.  It says all that needs to be said, with great wisdom and compassion.  

Jayden links to the video Jamey Rodemeyer made for the Its Get Better campaign.  For me, and I suspect many others, this suicide of a gay teen bullied to death is made even more poignant by the fact that he told his story in this video--so that we can see a face, hear a voice, recognize even more all that we've lost through yet another needless death, since a slice of Jamey's young life has been captured this way online.

I'll admit: I'm feeling numb as this week ends--a week in which Georgia executed a man about whose trial there were serious legal questions and even questions of guilt or innocence, and a week in which we learned of the suicide of another gay teen bullied because he was gay.  The numbness stems from the recognition of the definitiveness of death, as I noted in my posting about Troy Davis earlier this week.

Death puts an end to many of our questions--to our attempt to find justice, moral solutions to problems.  It puts an end to a life.  

I wish so strongly that, before we choose to walk down that path as a society, as we do through the barbaric practice of capital punishment, or before we permit another teen bullied to death to choose that path because of our indifference to the serious problem of school bullying, we'd think carefully about all that we lose--definitively so--when we take the life of another human being or permit a life to be snuffed out by suicide due to our lack of care.

And are the attitudes of some people of faith in any way implicated in the continuing serious problem of suicides of gay teens bullied by their peers?  Christian blogger John Shore thinks so.