Why…how far have we fallen as a society when we have parents raising children so cruel towards one another that we are seeing horrors like this – a 10 year old child who felt that there was no way out. At TEN. This happened in Columbus County, NC. (WRAL): Samantha West said she found her [...]

It’s bad enough that adult ignore situations where children are being harassed — driven to suicide in some cases… The mother of a 10-year-old Illinois girl who committed suicide by hanging herself said her daughter had been “teased and taunted” by kids at school and in the neighborhood. Stacy Conner told The News-Gazette in Champaign-Urbana [...]

By Amanda Goad, Staff Attorney, ACLU LGBT Project Chris Sigler is a senior at Sequoyah High School in Madisonville, Tennessee. It’s a tradition among Sequoyah students to get friends’ signatures on a keepsake T-shirt, so in past years Chris has done that on a shirt labeled “California” and one with the name of his favorite [...]

In August, 2011, the ACLU of Florida rushed to the assistance of Jerry Buell, a Florida public school teacher who said on Facebook that gay couples marrying in New York make him want to vomit. The ACLU did so without first investigating how Buell had contributed to a school environment hostile against LGBT students. The [...]

2009: A Massachusetts boy, Carl Walker-Hoover, hung himself earlier this week after enduring bullying at school, including daily taunts of being gay, despite his mother’s weekly pleas to the school to address the problem. She said she found her son, a sixth-grader at the school, hanging by an extension cord upstairs at their home. He was [...]

The separation of church and state — here’s exactly what happens when religious zealots are elected into public office and don’t see a problem with conflating the two: Lawmaker Pushes Bill To Allow Bullying Of Gay Students And Concealed Guns How did we get to this point, where purportedly educated people simply toss our founding [...]

Back in October I featured an Op-Ed by Orthodox Rabbi Steven Burg titled “There’s no place for bullying in God’s world”.  As the international director of NCSY, the youth program of the Orthodox Union, Rabbi Burg’s Op-Ed provides an important counter-balance to the public anti-LGBT voices of other clergy in his sect.  I have since [...]

Who can forget New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino’s recent homophobic screed delivered to an Orthodox Jewish congregation: “I just think my children and your children would be much better off and much more successful getting married and raising a family, and I don’t want them brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid [...]

It’s not often that I agree with Gary Randall, the retired televangelist from Oregon who has dedicated his golden years to vilifying Washington’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people and undermining the security of our families.  Today, however, he posted a diary in praise of Governor Gregoire and the Washington state Legislature for their [...]

Thursday the Washington State Senate passed HB 2801, An act relating to anti-harassment strategies in public schools.  The vote was 48-0 in the State Senate and 97-0 in the State House.  Impressive. Although an anti-bullying law was passed in Washington State in 2002, a report released in 2008 showed that bullying hadn’t abated.  Further legislation [...]