In the small Georgia town where I grew up, there is a blind hill that reaches its crest at the First Baptist Church where I spent most of my young life. It was a dangerous hill, because if anything, or anyone, was in the road when your car crested that hill, you wouldn’t see it until you were right on it—or had already run over it. It was a small two-lane road, but people would routinely speed over that hill with little regard for pedestrians, or animals, unfortunate enough to be crossing at that moment.
This is exactly why I chose that spot to commit suicide.
I was fifteen years old and was struggling with a new word that I had learned: “lesbian.” I knew it was word that applied to me—and the more vernacular “dyke” that I had been called by some classmates. I didn’t like either of them. “Lesbian” sounded like a horrible disease (no offense to natives of Lesbos), and “dyke” was not yet an epithet I had learned to love for its amazing power and strength.
After dark, when the downtown shops had closed and the streets were rolled up for the night, I took up a position in the middle of the oncoming lane, and sat down. It felt good. For the first time in a long time, I felt good—and a bit smug—knowing they’d find my body next to the church whose teachings had tormented me for so long. I began my death vigil, knowing that very soon a speeding car would take my life.
A selfish thing really—to ruin the life of whoever was unfortunate enough to be driving that car while taking my own. At fifteen, you don’t really think through the consequences of any of your actions. All you know is, you want the pain to stop. You want the burden to be lifted.
At fifteen, all you want to do is fit in—desperately—to be part of the in-crowd with lots of friends who love and support you. When you look different, though; when you have a deep voice for a girl and prefer plaid to pleats and baseball to beauty pageants, you get left out. You get called names. You get marginalized, excluded, harassed, and hounded. In short, you get bullied—and you can’t think of a way out except the ultimate way out.
As I sat in the road that night, I spotted a cat over near the steps to my home church. Contrary to lesbian lore I was not a cat fan at this stage in my life. I much preferred dogs and didn’t learn to love cats until much later. This cat, however, would not leave. I shooed it away and it kept circling on the sidewalk—smart enough to stay away from the deadly hill.
I really wanted to die alone, without even a feline witness, so I stood up and approached the cat, intending to take it down the road and drop it off somewhere so I could be left alone. As I reached the sidewalk and bent down for the cat—whoosh!!—a car sped over the hill.
The reality of what I was trying to do instantly washed over me. That instinct to live kicked in and suddenly I was grateful that this annoying cat had lured me out of the path of the oncoming car. Depending on one’s worldview, either God sent the cat, or it was an incredible stroke of luck. Either way, my life was spared, and in that moment, I was glad for it, and vowed to never try to take my life again. Whatever I was going through, it would get better. If not right now, sometime soon.
For at least six young gay people, there was no cat by the side of the road to save them from themselves. They each succeeded in taking their own lives after being bullied and humiliated by others who felt confident that society—and religion—approved of them berating another human being for being gay.
Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, even wondered in an article on his Web site why there was “no one to step between (Rutgers student) Tyler Clementi and that bridge.”
The death of Clementi and five other kids, who were either gay or perceived as such, would be a wonderful opportunity for Mohler to show some real compassion, or perhaps even cop to Christianity’s culpability in their deaths; but he makes no such effort as he writes about the suicides on his blog. Instead, he continues to bash gays and lesbians—calling them “sinners” who simply just can’t accept the truth.
In other words, the believing church cannot surrender to the demand that we disobey and reject biblical truth. That much is clear. We cannot lie to persons about the sinfulness of their sin, nor comfort them with falsehood about their moral accountability before God. The rush of the liberal churches and denominations to normalize homosexuality is now a hallmark of their disobedience to the Bible.
Instead of telling gays and lesbians that they are valuable children of God, Mohler counsels his readers to simply tell the “truth” louder, more forcefully—to not waver from their dedication to a serving a book over saving the lives of real people.
The reason I sat at the top of that hill that one lonely night was because I bought all the lies Mohler and his cohorts continue to sell. I bought the lie that I was a sinner who deserved death—why else would I want to die? I bought the lie that I was the one who was messed up while the rest of the world—that mean, bullying, hateful world—was normal. I bought the lie that God could not love me unless I changed and became one of those mean, bullying, hateful “normal” bigots.
I did what most gay kids who live through these desperate teen years do—I abandoned God. The only way I could survive as a young teen dealing with homosexuality was to stop caring about what people said God said about me. This is why so many gay and lesbian people abandon Christianity or religion all together. To survive in this world, we simply have to walk away from religions that tell us we are “sinful” and undeserving of God’s love.
Through the Metropolitan Community Church, and their message of God’s unconditional love and acceptance, I found my way back to God in my early twenties; but, for me, leaving God was an act of self-preservation in high school. Some kids are not as lucky. Some have parents who force them to attend church, who force them to go through “ex-gay” treatments, and force them to remain confused and ashamed of who they are. Some escape through suicide, others through drugs, others through running away, others never escape—taught to repress their true selves for eternity. What Mohler counsels Christian followers to do is to continue bullying gays and lesbians, only more gently.
As Christians, we just have to wonder. Was there no believer to befriend Tyler and, without loving his homosexuality, love him? The homosexual community insists that to love someone is to love their sexual orientation. We know this to be a lie.
The sad truth is, Mohler’s advice will only create more suicides, because it is the hatred of that intrinsic part of a gay or lesbian person—their God-given sexual orientation—that drives us to commit suicide. If you “love the sinner and hate the sin” it is not the love of the person but the hatred of their sin that causes you to preach the “truth” to them. No one wants to be treated that way.
In the end, Mohler asks his readers: “What if Tyler Clementi had been in your church? Would he have heard biblical truth presented in a context of humble truth-telling and gospel urgency, or would he have heard irresponsible slander, sarcastic jabs, and moralistic self-congratulation?”
At my church, he would have heard that God loves him, no matter what. He would have heard that God calls us to be just like that cat who saved me from myself so long ago. Mr. Mohler, that cat by the side of the road had no theological agenda, no venerated holy book—it merely persisted in remaining with me until I was out of harm’s way. That’s the only way any of us should treat someone in pain—not with preaching, or “truth,” but pure, unconditional, persistent, love.
