Joel Burns, an openly gay city councilman in Fort Worth, took a moment in this week's council meeting to reassure young LGBTQ Texans, and Americans, that "life gets better." In so doing, Burns engaged in a profiles in courage moment by an elected politician we rarely see these days.
Burns story, an emotional and detailed walk through the "coming out" process, was in reaction to the troubling increase of teen suicides and acts of bullying against young men and women who are conflicted about their sexuality. It's a heart wrenching situation to continue to watch unfold, and, unfortunately, an all too familiar one.
My own "coming out" process mirrors Councilman Burns. I find it fascinating that upon coming out and discovering one's individual identity, and then discovering one's community, how you're not alone anymore when the only feeling you experienced your entire life was in fact loneliness. There are many parallels to the millions of "coming out" stories that only the LGBTQ community knows. Our stories are the same. The process is the same. The emotional stress is the same. The bullying experience is the same. The whole process is the same. Something else is the same too-that it does get better. We as the LGBTQ community are that safety net for the millions of other Americans, young and old, who have yet to fully experience their own individual liberation from what I can only describe as an internal personal hell. If you find it puzzling as to why anyone would take their own life as a result of such a tormenting process, I challenge you to step into the shoes of a gay friend or loved one. I lost count by the age of 19 how many times I contemplated and attempted suicide just to relieve my own individual anguish and pain. As God is my witness, I'm thankful that I didn't because my life only became better.
I can't help but wonder whether the recent spike in suicides and heinous acts of bullying against gay Americans has something to do with the drastic increase in hate mongering and nasty, spiteful rhetoric we've seen from political discourse today. It has become all too common every election cycle for one community of Americans to be the proverbial political piñata in the hopes of galvanizing energy and votes for Election Day. The LGBTQ community has certainly been on that target list before---particularly in the last decade. This list has notably included women, Native Americans, Hispanics, African-Americans, Muslims, Asians and many other communities too. Arguably this election cycle we see almost all minority communities in the cross hairs of vitriol political rhetoric that is not only damaging to the important dialectic argument over policy, but also American values as well.
Who are we? Is the United States really the land of liberty and equality? Is the United States the beacon of hope and opportunity we so proudly proclaim?
If so it is time to begin once more working toward that more perfect Union our country has labored so mightily to pursue. It's time we reclaim the American values we hold dear--life, liberty, equality, opportunity, and the pursuit of happiness. And never forget too that all those values know no race, gender, creed, religion, or sexual orientation.
This election, as is every other election, is certainly a search for the soul of who we are as a nation and where we are going in the years to come. One can only hope that how these heart wrenching, heinous acts of violence seemed to have moved a community to once more lift each other up, that it also lifts our nation and moves her forward.
