I attended the safe schools seminar on October 20th regarding the issue of religion and GLBT. I did enjoy the structure of the seminar with the movie clips and discussion after. I was shocked and disgusted at the movie. I could not believe some of these families stories and how terribly these people were / are treated. For example, one story was of a girl who committed suicide because she felt that she could not be a lesbian and she could no longer deal with everything that came along with that. They gave the statistic that a person who identifies as GLBT is 3 to 7 times more likely to committ suicide than someone who does not identify as GLBT. This breaks my heart honestly and it makes me sad that even today, when I think our society continues to become more and more welcoming and open-minded that people feel they have no way out of the cruel world they live in than to take their own life.
I was also struck by the family that was in politics. The daughter who identified as a lesbian talked about the pressure she felt to be the "cookie cutter" family and daughter in the eyes of her family and society. She even went so far as to getting married to a male and trying to live her life unhappy. Finally, she could not hide it anymore and came out to her parents. What struck me about this story is that dispite the difficulty for the family, the father talked about unconditional love for ALL his children. He described unconditional love in a very simplistic way by saying it is loving someone no matter what the conditions. I think this is so important for families to recognize as well as for people to recognize about God. It is my belief that He holds unconditional love for all of his children, loving them under any and all conditions.
The final piece that I thought was necessary to address was fear. The movie talked about the realness of fear that people in society have of the "other." I think that is absolutely true. We fear what we do not know and therefore fear becomes the scapegoat for people. I also like the parents who recognized that part of why it is hard to have a child that identifies as GLBT is that they are fearful of what that child may face and fearful that they will not be able to protect them.
Overall I really enjoyed this seminar and I think these seminars are a really great way to get future and current teachers informed and talking. They have brought more awareness to me and I really do find them to be influencial on me. I would have liked to see a panal of insiders in various religious groups speak and answer questions about this topic. I think that could be very powerful.
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Unfortunately, I was not able to attend this GLBT seminar, but I would have really liked to, especially after reading this blog post. The first paragraph in particular struck me the most.
A few years ago, I lost my cousin to suicide. It really is the hardest thing I have ever had to experience, deal with, and live through. Though I would like to advocate and support so many issues of diversity and hardship, if I could only choose one it would absolutely be mental illness awareness and suicide prevention. I have participated in three fundraising walks for the Out of the Darkness foundation so far, and plan on continuing my efforts to help.
My cousin that died has a sister who currently struggles with identifying herself as GLBT. For this reason, the statistic presented in this blog that "a person who identifies as GLBT is 3 to 7 times more likely to commit suicide than someone who does not identify as GLBT" was very disturbing. It really hit me very hard because I wish she would feel comfortable enough to communicate with the rest of our family about it. Because of the way society is, as we have studied throughout this course and as Gina heard about at this seminar, this may be a long way off. It is really important that we all become educated and involved in issues that are really pertinent to society.
Wow. What a moving seminar! I definitely wish that I could have attended because I can relate in more than one way. First of all, strangely in relation to Colleen I lost my cousin 1 month ago to suicide and can understand just how hard that is and it makes me incredibly grateful to know that you, Colleen are reaching out and contributing in that way.
Secondly, I would like to say that my mother is a lesbian and has had a partner living with us since I was in first grade, immediately after my parent's divorced. As you might realize now after attending this seminar just how many issues are brought into my family's life with this. The fact that people are having such a hard time with being able to freely express themselves as gay, is so sad but so incredibly real in our world today. Even in our own family, my sister has such a difficult time with this still and is no where near as accepting of my mom's partner as I am. I have grown to love and include her in my life in many ways, but my sister still has not at the age of 24. It could be because of her strong religious background that you mentioned and there are many other sidenotes to this situation in my family that I will not get into, but my point is that this really is such a tough struggle. I do hear rude comments and have grown up with rumors all around me at my high school about my family and such, but I still feel extremely lucky to have two (three with a stepmom) wonderful mothers who care so much about me. Also, my mother's partner is a physical education teacher at an elementary school and has to be extremely cautious with this issue in a school as well. It's sad but hopefully one day people will see past the gender of a relationship.
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