I should keep my mouth shut, but foolishly avoiding such, let me say the following.
First, and most importantly, I’m sorry to hear of the death of Daryl. This is a horrible tragedy, and it’s terrible that it had to end this way.
Now, Joe_Cool, as cowardly as suicide may seem to you, it’s still a tragedy. I’m just echoing here, but the pain is just so severe that you can’t see another way out.
On the other hand, I do feel strongly that it’s terrible to blame the parents for his death. When you are grieving the death of your child, no matter what the circumstances leading up to it, the last thing that needs to be done is to blame the parents for his death. I hope his parents may receive support in the death of their child, and am sorry to hear of anyone’s child dying.
Now, even if the facts were incorrect, it would be better to first grieve and then worry about the veracity of the situation. I doubt that the facts are incorrect, however.
“People like you” is still “people like you”, not “you”
I won’t call you crazy, but I will suggest that you are not necssarily reading accurately here.
Additionally, if J-C commits suicide tonight saying that all gobears bashing of him drove him to it, I’ll:
Not demand proof from you that he committed suicide or reasons why.
Not tell you that he was wrong about why he claimed he was committing suicide.
not suggest that you’re lying about what he said.
To be very blunt, since you both seem to be adept at misreading things I"m posting:
I believe that asking andygirl for a ‘cite’ (as was done in the GD thread) was crass and unneccessary (I detailed all of my reasons there - but sucinctly 'cause even if she could have demonstrated everything that she’d said was accurate - and that was impossible- it wouldn’t have mattered to the debate)
I believe that andygirl reported accurately what the suicide said to her.
I believe that the young man reported accurately his reasons to be suicidal.
I do not have access to sufficient information to suggest that any specific statement from his parents was accurately reported however, we have what the kid’s impressions were.
I believe that the parents are deserving of sympathy, they lost their son.
I believe that the kid was deserving of sympathy, as well.
I believe that andygirl is deserving of an apology.
I believe that other people demonstrate what I believe to be Christian morality far better than the demonstrations I see from Joe_Cool & Jersey Diamond.
I believe that gobear did not make a direct accusation about Joe and that a fair reading of his posting would indicate that. That once it was pointed out, a person who was merely mistaken would have backed down. That a person who, after it was pointed out, still insisted that it was a personal accusation is perhaps being purposefully obtuse, possesses reading/comprehension problems, deliberately being provactive, lying or any combination that floats your boat.
I did not say that Joe_Cool said I was unfit to live–read the post. I said he was an evil compassionless motherfucker, which he is, based on this comment,
You are a liar, JD, because you put an accusation in my mouth that I never made. Don’t you EVER accuse me of making anything up again.
Except for this, Joe. Andygirl is not just some gay person who happened on this story and tried to turn it into a gay rights issue. She’s a fellow student with Daryl (or was, until he died) who was his friend and counselor. Unless I miss my guess, she encouraged him to find the moral courage to come out to his parents, and is now blaming herself for having done so. Unless he comes back from the grave and posts to this thread, she’s about as close to firsthand documentation as you’re going to get on the facts behind this story.
Secondly, they didn’t “just lost their child” – they threw him away a short time prior to his death. Or didn’t you read the link where Andygirl reported that they disowned him?
Third, I’m not condemning them – I’m trying to find it in my heart to have sympathy for them in their loss – because now they’ll never have a chance to say “I’m sorry” and “Let’s reconcile” to him. I’ll bet they’re experiencing a lot of grief, and not a small part of it is realizing that it was self-inflicted – that they were the ones who drove him to kill himself.
So therefore this entire board is worthless, because every single piece of material on it that’s not my own words is secondhand information at best to me, and the same for your posts to you.
Second-, third-, and additional-hand information is valuable, but needs to be taken with a grain of salt, rather than believed utterly – how reliable is the witness who speaks? In this case, I’m personally confident, and a plethora of other members here with me, that Andygirl is a totally reliable source when she is speaking from firsthand experience, and usually otherwise as well. She is a person of great compassion and integrity, whom I trust a great deal. (BTW, a small nitpick: hearsay evidence is only unacceptable in court in certain circumstances, and in others is acceptable, when accompanied by instructions to the jury from the bench if it’s a jury trial, that they are not to regard it as factual evidence but as the statement of the party testifying as to what he was told, read, etc., and weighted according to their judgment of his veracity and putative accuracy in reporting it. I suspect a lawyer could expound on this at greater detail – in fact, I’ll start a GQ thread later on what the ramifications are.)
Yes, it’s unChristian of you – there are a bunch of people who need compassion and support in this situation, not least Andygirl, who is brokenhearted at losing a friend whom she was trying to help. And I trust that now that you’ve vented your spleen on this, you’ll agree that the expressed attitudes of the parents were a contributing factor to the suicide, right?
In nearly every case (grandstanding for attention and the self-euthanasia of someone with a terminal disease to one side), an intended suicide results from despair. Deep depression and a sense that one’s resources are not up to coping with what one must face.
To blame the suicide for leaving behind a mess shows a total lack of compassion for the suiciding person and fairly little compassion for the people who loved him/her as well, since the causes of the particular suicide are going to be haunting them as well.
Finally, my unassisted resources are not up to coping with my situation or what I might have to face sometime down the road. Neither are yours, nor Jersey’s or CJ’s or Barb’s or **Pun[/.b]'s or anybody else’s. You know as well as I do where we get the strength to cope. And given the threads we’ve jointly participated in over the last year or so, it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out why Daryl wouldn’t think that that Source of Strength was something that he could access – especially given that his parents (on the implications of Andygirl’s report, to be sure) were evidently very firm on “homosexulaity=sin” and no doubt inculcated that in him from the time the subject first came up between them.
Gobear’s words, Jersey, were “…people like you…” i.e., in Gobear’s opinion, people who seem to care more about passages of Scripture and people who deserve sympathy because their Biblically-based stance and consequent disowning of their child drive that child to suicide, than to the kid who’s without the resources to cope with that attitude and unable to change who he is to suit their preferences. And while I won’t presume to speak for gobear, speaking for myself, that appears to be Joe’s stance in this thread; if it is not what he’s trying to say, I would welcome his correcting it.
In the interests of accuracy, I want to mention that I never said I talked to him before he died. I didn’t. I knew him to no great extent. I had heard that his parents had not taken his coming out well when that happened, and after he died I, as well as the other student leaders in the rainbow alliance, were told the details surrounding it because of our role in the gay community here.
Who are we to pass any sort of judgment on the actions of the parents while they are dealing with the loss of their child? Can’t we grieve with andygirl and Daryl’s family?
We can pass judgement because they had already chosen to exclude him from their lives. They couldn’t be grieving too much, if they had already decided that their lives were better off without him. We can judge them because their ignorance and bigotry was more important to them than their own child. I say the parents are compassionless scum who are directly responsible for the death of their son.
YOU are the liar, gentleman gobear. We’ve seen numerous times before in numerous threads, your propensity to link unrelated things together to form an “insult by association”, accuse me of being representative of groups that have nothing to do with me, and lie outright to try to make your point (remember the “it vanished in the board crash” fiasco?). So save your moral outrage and your Don’t-you-EVERs for somebody who will swallow them.
Now, if you please, since these “People like me” are saying that you’re not fit to live just because you’re gay, and since I have never said that or anything like it, in what way, then, are those people “people like me”?
Or will you admit that you falsely tried to associate me with “those people” in order to contrive an insult by association? I’m really sick of people like YOU who think lies and falsehoods are acceptable as long as they cause people to reach a “good” conclusion.
So add on one more hand to the chain (fourth hand at best, now), and maybe one more for the apparent exaggeration of the depth of her relationship with Daryl (from a friend she’s so upset over that she can hardly stand it, to hardly knowing him). It seems you all got your panties in a twist accusing the parents on COMPLETELY BASELESS grounds, rather than somewhat questionable ones.
I’ll wait for the apologies to start rolling in, now that we see I was right. But since I know that won’t happen, I’ll just reiterate that you people need to CHECK YOUR FACTS before you start railing about how evil somebody is, after they have suffered the death of their child.
Polycarp:
There sure has been some unchristian behavior here. Certainly a portion of it was your own jumping into the fray with both feet, accusing the parents of throwing away their child with no evidence whatsoever to support that conclusion. While I don’t expect apologies from the rest of the rabble, I imagine you would hold yourself to a higher standard than most. Right?
By the way, what I claim to be right about isn’t that the parents are innocent, but that there is no evidence that they are not. You have all been bashing them for two pages, railing on about how horrible they are and what they deserve, when you have no basis for that conclusion, other than a FOURTH HAND report from somebody who admittedly didn’t know him well and heard the details from others AFTER the death.
And the apologies I want are not to me, but to his parents for making the horrible and heartless accusation that they bear guilt for his death.
Save your pity, G. I don’t need it. I quite like myself. But how about addressing the content of my posts, instead of grandstanding about how you don’t like me? That would impress me much more.
Oh good grief. We were acquaintences. We hung out a bit, ate lunch every now and then, and generally knew each other because it’s a small community at a small school. No, he was not my closest friend and we didn’t share dark secrets, but I fail to see how you can get “I hardly knew him” from what I said. Or that the circumstances surrounding his death are completely baseless. I also fail to see how I shouldn’t be upset about his death, especially the circumstances.
How did I get it? From this: “I knew him to no great extent.” An acquaintance. Ok, maybe it’s not “hardly”, but I’d imagine that not exactly hysterical-sobbing territory either.
This all came from a misguided attempt to vilify the parents, with no knowledge of what happened. Nobody ever said you shouldn’t be upset about his death. But I honestly don’t see how the fact that you’re both gay should make you more upset over his death than you’d be if he had been a straight teenager committing suicide. Suicide is suicide. I don’t see how the circumstances enter into it.
Joe, if you actually believe that none of us has any knowledge as to what happened, then you should perhaps re-read every post andygirl has made. Twice, if you still don’t understand.
As for why she should be more upset over the fact that a friend of hers killed himself because (in great part, at the very least) his parents disowned him for being gay, how about the fact that it’s an issue very close to her ow heart? How about the fact that Daryl isn’t the first person she knows to whom this has happened?
As for the whole “straight teenager committing suicide” bit, remind, again, when was the last time someone committed suicide because his or her parents disowned him or her for being straight? I don’t seem to have any recollection of that ever happening.
And this persistence of yours on the number of people the news has gone through is almost amusing until one remembers we’re not talking about a game of Telephone but someone’s death. I fail to see how circumstances surrounding suicide (or death, in general) can really change all that much in such a short time frame unless someone is lying, and if you believe there to be some sort of miscommunication maybe you should offer up a reason for it.
I wish some folks would take their ‘agendas’ and get the fuck out of threads that were originally started to vent anger at a useless death that could have been prevented with a little love and compassion.
Funny, I wish the very same thing. I don’t have an agenda. andygirl already admitted that she didn’t talk to the guy before his death and didn’t know him very well. She heard through the grapevine that it was the standard “homosexuals=good christians=bad” garbage. You don’t know what could have prevented his death. All you know is a fourth hand (at best) account, filtered through a gay organization’s leadership. That means that it had already been agendized before you ever got wind of it.
The fact is that nobody on this board knows why he killed himself, not even andygirl. Hence my complaint with the accusations against his parents.
