Suicidocracy
(Trigger Warning for…everything)
SCENARIO 1:
Terrorist: Let everyone on this list of political prisoners free by midnight Friday or I will blow myself up in a public place and kill innocent bystanders.
Society: We don’t negotiate with terrorists!
SCENARIO 2:
Abused wife: He says if I ever leave him, he’ll kill himself, and I believe him.
Society: Girlfriend, you cannot let him blackmail you into spending your whole life with an abuser just because he says he’ll kill himself. He’s accountable for his own decisions, and you need to do what’s right for you and your kids.
SCENARIO 3:
LGBT Activists and Fellow-Travelers: If you don’t change your whole belief system to accommodate every conceivable sexual orientation and paraphilia, teenagers will kill themselves and their blood will be on your hands!
Society: Sounds serious, you’d better give them what they’re asking for unless you want kids to kill themselves.
“But the reason that we don’t negotiate with terrorists isn’t that we don’t care if people die. It’s that if we give into their demands we’ll encourage other terrorists, which will result in even more deaths. So the utilitarian calculus demands that we not give in to the suicide bomber, but gay teen suicides are nothing like that.”
Are you so sure? Most reputable studies suggest that when young people are exposed to sensationalist media portrayals of suicide, they are more likely to try it themselves. Columbia University attributes this to “social modeling.” In fact, one of the CDC’s principal recommendations for community response to a teen suicide is that it “should be conducted in a manner that avoids glorification of the suicide victims and minimizes sensationalism.” It also says that the “precise nature of the methods used by decedent(s) in committing suicide should not be disclosed.”
Remember those words: “avoids glorification of the suicide victims and minimizes sensationalism.”
Now take a gander at this article:
“An Ohio transgender’s teen’s suicide, a mother’s anguish”
Sensationalist details? Check. Precise method of suicide disclosed? Check. Glorification of the victim? Ohhhhhh yes.
Number of Google results for “Leelah Alcorn”? 270,000.
Now imagine that you are a young gay/transsexual teenager with suicidal thoughts who doesn’t feel accepted by his parents. You see this outpouring of affection for a transgender teenager who committed suicide. You see CNN and who knows who else broadcast his suicide note (posted on Tumblr) for all the world to read and feel his pain. You see his mother dragged out for public scorn by the media and internet for her backwards, bigoted mistreatment of him. You see Hollywood stars dedicating their little golden statues to him.*
Is all that going to make you less likely to follow through on your suicidal thoughts, or more so?
And when this pattern repeats itself over and over, when the media talks hysterically about an epidemic of gay teen suicides (despite a paucity of evidence that there is one) might that become a form of “social modeling?”
“What, so you are saying that WE, the LGBT allies, are somehow responsible for gay teen suicides?”
No, I don’t accuse people of murder when they haven’t killed anyone. It’s refreshing, you should try it.
*Like most straight men with gainful employment, I do not watch the Golden Globes. I found that article by Googling “Leelah Alcorn hagiography.” Well done, Google, very well done.
Filed under: Deseret Review | Tags: gays of intolerance, LDS, mass media, That Hideous Strength, the Cathedral
G.
November 11, 2015
There is a certain fascination to witnessing a blood libel and witchhunt live and in person.
Agellius
November 11, 2015
Excellent. I’m going to bookmark this for future reference.
Vader
November 11, 2015
G.,
Yes, but I prefer to watch it from a perspective other than as the guest of honor.
Agellius,
Indeed. We have considered putting a list of our more timeless posts on the sidebar; if we ever do, this should be one. We could file it under “Ammo.”
Oh, that needed a trigger warning, didn’t it? My bad.
YaleLGHPQWR!
November 11, 2015
I find the word “trigger” disconcerting. Period. Apologize NOW! Could you please use a different, less traumatizing word?
Bookslinger
November 11, 2015
Bruce Charlton was spot on. PC is nihilism.
And Daid Warren was right when he said Progressives are Satan’s henchmen.
http://www.jrganymede.com/2014/02/19/progressives-are-henchmen-of-the-devil/
JKC
November 12, 2015
“LGBT Activists and Fellow-Travelers: If you don’t change your whole belief system to accommodate every conceivable sexual orientation and paraphilia, teenagers will kill themselves and their blood will be on your hands!”
I know you’re going for hyperbole, so maybe this isn’t a totally fair comment, but while that is the message that you get from the more extreme activists, that isn’t the message I hear from (at least most of) those within the church that draw attention to the high suicide rates of gay teens. The message I get is more like “we can (and need to) to better at making gay kids feel loved and not hopeless; at the very least we need to stop doing stupid stuff like kicking them out of the house when they come out.”
Surely we can (and probably should) do that without compromising one whit on doctrine.
The CDC recommendations are really important, too.
Bookslinger
November 12, 2015
jkc: It’s not hyperbole at all. The movers and shakers really do have that as their goal. It is only the low level useful-idiots, either advocates or neutral observers, who don’t realize that is where things are headed.
Satan’s possibly greatest tactic is incrementalism: moving goalposts, boiling the frog, pity->endure->embrace.
When a teen comes out as gay, it’s too late to do some things that could have been done. And our cultural beliefs that “gay is okay, nothing wrong with it” and “homosexuality is always and only inborn” prevent both prevention and healing from SSA. Those cultural beliefs allow SSA-afflicted individuals to get trapped in a mentally, morally and physically destructive lifestyle.
If you know someone who is SSA, you likely can’t heal them from SSA (though I’ve read cases of where it does happen, and it can be a decades long process). But if you care about them, you don’t want them immersed in a homosexual culture/millieu or lifestyle. Violence (gay-on-gay), hyper-promiscuity, diseases, shortened lifespan, and just general misery, are all part and parcel of “doing gay.”
Aside from the main tactic to gain societal acceptance for homosexual sex acts, SSM is also a decoy. SSM has taken attention away from the fact that hyper-promiscuity is part and parcel of the average male homosexual lifestyle. Gays who want to marry are a very small percentage of gays. Gays who want to marry and stay completely faithful to their partner are even fewer, as many/most gay marriages are “open” marriages.
You’re right, kicking a gay teen out of the house is not a good idea. And by that age, teens have already absorbed both the “gay is okay” and “born that way” memes/myths.
The church’s new meme of “being gay” versus “doing gay” is a good step in the right direction. If it’s too late or too unlikely to heal a child of SSA (“being gay”), then, at least, every attempt should be made to help that person avoid “doing gay.” Because “doing gay” is destructive of body, mind, and spirit. And not just in some hereafter, it is destructive in this life.
MC
November 12, 2015
JKC,
I don’t think “hyperbole” is quite what you mean, since you admit that this is in fact the message one gets from “extreme” activists. So our dispute would be in just how far into the fringe of the pro-gay movement one has to venture to find the sentiment that Church doctrine itself, not un-Christian behavior by individual Mormons, is responsible for gay suicide.
So just this morning I plugged the words “Mormon” “gay” and “suicide” into Twitter, and here’s what I came up with:
http://fox13now.com/2015/11/10/lgbtq-advocates-see-spike-in-suicide-calls-after-announcement-of-lds-policy-change-officials-say/
“Advocates” report a surge in suicide hotline calls after a change in official Church policy. Oh sure, we can’t prove that there’s a connection, nor are we actually going to provide any solid data, we’ll just let the insinuation hover out there and hope that some fringe outlet like the local Fox network affiliate in SLC pick it up.
There is always something like this out there.
MC
November 12, 2015
I’m just going to leave this out there:
https://twitter.com/ByCommonConsent/status/662489140512993280
James
November 13, 2015
@MC the fox news link doesn’t work. Either the URL is not quite right or they took down the page. Maybe they read this blog.
Bookslinger
November 13, 2015
James, the link worked yesterday.
MC
November 13, 2015
Looks like they took it down.
yyy
November 13, 2015
Here is a cached version:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://fox13now.com/2015/11/10/lgbtq-advocates-see-spike-in-suicide-calls-after-announcement-of-lds-policy-change-officials-say/