It’s Texas. She’s Gay.
There’s worse things than growing up gay in Texas. I can’t think of what they are, but Dante’s inferno might come close.
We try to cure gay in Texas.
A Texas teen’s extended family is asking the public for help to “Save Sarah,” a 17-year-old girl whose parents sent her off to an East Texas boarding facility to “pray the gay away” after she took her girlfriend to prom.
Some people doubt this is real. I have every reason on God’s green earth to believe it is. They had me at “East Texas.”
The CHA Law Group representing the teen and her family confirmed the statements on the GoFundMe page on Wednesday.
“I can’t comment on pending litigation, other than to authenticate that to the best of my knowledge, the background information on the GoFundMe shared by Sarah’s cousin is truthful,” Sarah’s lawyer Christine Andresen said.
This is East Texas, bygawd, and we can cure anything.
Even East Texas can’t cure stoopid.
1Pervangelists have a wide stance of child abuse. When they are not physically assaulting children, they mentally abuse them. If the Texas judge doesn’t appoint a guardian ad litem to protect Sarah, DOJ needs to be contacted to protect her from her abusers.
2Obviously, not everything can be cured in East Texas. Stupidity and cruelty, for example.
3Doesn’t GoFundMe refuse to fund bigoted causes once someone draws their attention to such things? I do hope so.
Some teen who got similar “treatment” said that his mother finally apologized after she discovered how close he’d come to suicide after a few weeks of it.
4Maybe it’s me, but that link seems to go to about:blank.
5Susan, I wish I could say it was just Texas, but it’s not. I can recall a number of years ago at a conference of educators in Arizona, I was relating my experiences growing up gay in Idaho Falls in a Mormon family. As I told my story, there were audible gasps in the audience. More than once, in fact.
Since I came out a quarter century ago, I have made it my life’s mission to counsel gay teens and their parents, to help gay youth avoid living the hell that I lived through as a teen. Over the years, I’ve counseled thousands. While the hits to my web pages have declined substantially in recent years, as acceptance of and support for gay teens has increased, the need for the support for gay teens has never gone away, and as long as conservative religion still exists, it never will. Still, to this day, the largest single category of homeless teens (about a third) are sexual minority kids who have been expelled by intolerant religious parents. Religion all too often wraps bigotry in velvet robes and calls it religious belief, but that does not mean it is not still bigotry.
As Bertrand Russel once observed, “It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age, but if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion.”
What I can promise you, based on my decades of experience, is that this poor girl’s suffering is rooted in religion. Of the thousands of flame emails I have received from homophobes over the years, fewer than a dozen did not show evidence of religious belief. It’s why I consider religion to be one of the four great impediments to the advancement of civilization (the other three being tribalism/nationalism, capitalist rentiering, and conservatism).
It is why a thorough, rigorous grounding in critical thinking, reason and logic are the most important subjects the public school system can possibly teach, along with their routine and rigorous use from the early grades all the way through high school, so that use of them becomes habitual. If that were to happen, religion, with all its bigotry, meanspiritedness and intolerance, would gradually fade away and the world would be infinitely better off for it.
6Great post, Scott Bidstrup.
7Scott Bidstrup, thank you for that spectacular comment and everything you have done to benefit young people. Please share more and your recommendations on combating ignorance.
8There must be a sophisticated way of saying stupid – let me think?
9bud malone, there are many ways of saying st00pid. Steve King, Louis Gohmert, pervangelists, snacilbupeR, et al. But none of them are sophisticated.
10And once again a right-wing area denounces gay and chooses dreary. Don’t these people ever get tired of conformity?
11With zealots, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t,
12and science is a dirty word. Things like genetics and biology are forbidden subjects and the result is a travesty like this one.
Re-read the original post and I may have gotten it backwards; if the GoFundMe campaign is to help the girl get away from the bigots then I’m all for it. But the link still doesn’t work for me.
13Here’s another link for the story, someone needs to punch the head of the so-called ‘San Antonio Family Association’.
http://www.kens5.com/news/local/texas/family-attempting-to-free-gay-teen-from-pray-the-gay-away-camp/236163743
14Thanks Sam In SA. JJs link did not work for me, either.
15I’d ask if the facility is approved and accredited,but that would be silly in a state where science = superstition.
@George in Lee County
I have only 60+ years dealing with deep east Texas stupidity and cruelty so I could easily be wrong, but I’d think that east Texas is the universe’s epicenter of such.
@Scott Bidstrup
Thanks for building up when its so easy, given the circumstances, to tear down. +1.
“pray the gay away” just shuts my mouth. As my sainted father would have said “I’ve seen a goat-roping, a fat stock show, and a duck fart under water, but if that don’t beat any damn thing I’ve ever seen, I’ll put in with you!”
16Yeah. Because we want to make certain sure our daughter hates herself as much as we hate her. Because she’s gay.
17“This is East Texas, bygawd, and we can cure anything”
whether it needs to be or not!
18@Scott Bidstrup thank you for your post and for all you have done to help kids. I hope Sarah has someone in her life like you to help her through this.
19Ditto to the gratitude for Scott and his work. What those damned parents are doing to Sarah just enrages me. Just as much the pervangelists bastards like that shameful “[anti]family association.”
In the early 21st century I had the opportunity to work with young LBTG women and men. It was a wonderful experience. Those kids were so smart, funny, beautiful, talented, and kind. I’m very grateful for my time with them.
Oh, that was in Rapid City, South Damnkota. Yeah, deep red SoDak has LBTG youth too. Hell of a state to be LBTG in. And western South Damnkota (Mount Rushmore country), is so red it’s nearly black. Ugh. I’m thrilled I’m no longer there!
20just un effing believable! pray the gay away? geez what a grift. a dangerous grift, but a grift nonetheless.
21How sad that a discredited, revolting so called religious program is still around to torture gay young people. This is nothing less than mental torture. I sincerely hope that Sarah is aided and kept safe from those sick minded psychopaths who enjoy torturing children.
22I hope Sarah turns 18 soon. And that when she does, she sues her parents. Can parents be sued for inflicting this kind of abuse and mental anguish?
And the worst part is, they’re doing it out of love. Because all their lives, the sick, warped people whom they chose as their spiritual leaders have convinced them that people like their beautiful child were Made Wrong. So instead of loving her as she is, they reject her very essence, and try to remake her in the stifling, crippling image that their religion considers acceptable. I hope that she can change their minds and hearts, while living her own life.
23Did you mean ‘cure’ or ’cause. East Texas is great for mosquitos, trees, and ‘coonasses’, not much else.
24Well said, Scott Bidstrup. Thank you for playing it forward.
25On a happier note…I am very proud of my ex-nephew-in-law. There’s a great news story on her accomplishment.
http://www.twcnews.com/tx/austin/news/2016/06/6/austin-artists-shining-spotlight-on-gender-diversity-.html?cid=twitter_TWCNewsAustin
26Sam in SA, thanks for the link; I have contributed.
27East Texas may not have a fix for stupid but they have a lock on the miracle cure for intelligence. Long ago on a cross country trip I ended up in Tyler on 4th of July. I half expected the parade to include a pickup pulling a bale of hay painted black.
28You’d think they’d have noticed that they haven’t “prayed the maleparts back inside the pants and the zippers kept zipped” yet. Or do they consider that it’s God’s will for men to assault and rape and molest little girls, and the only people who need their sexual behavior corrected are gay?
But then, East Texas. Which is not alone in this.
29Great Scott, you won the internet today. Thanks for being a mensch as well as a mentor.
30An update from GoFundMe says Sarah has been released from the gulag. Money will go for her lawyer and any excess to her college fund, since it’s not likely her folks will contribute to that.
31