Vermont : Gay Marriage and the Gay Boy's Mum

I love Vermont. It's beautiful, laid back and lefty, full of old and cool hippies....and black and white cows. They don't allow billboards near roads, and of course, it's the place where Ben and Jerry invented funky ice cream. Back when they were still flower children.

But these days the soothing mooing of the cows has been replaced by a new and ugly sound. Little, peaceful, tolerant Vermont is looking into whether to allow gay marriage. And the religious bigots are howling in the woods, and spewing their usual monkey shite.

The local newspapers have been publishing their hysterical hate-filled letters to the editor blaming gay people for EVERYTHING.

So another letter has been making the rounds. A letter written eight years ago by the Vermont mother of a bullied gay kid ....who after hearing the same kind of religious crap... decided she'd had enough..

I’m tired of your foolish rhetoric about the “homosexual agenda” and your allegations that accepting homosexuality is the same thing as advocating sex with children. You are cruel and ignorant. You have been robbing me of the joys of motherhood ever since my children were tiny.

My firstborn son started suffering at the hands of the moral little thugs from your moral, upright families from the time he was in the first grade. He was physically and verbally abused from first grade straight through high school because he was perceived to be gay.

In high school, while your children were doing what kids that age should be doing, mine labored over a suicide note, drafting and redrafting it to be sure his family knew how much he loved them. My sobbing 17-year-old tore the heart out of me as he choked out that he just couldn’t bear to continue living any longer, that he didn’t want to be gay and that he couldn’t face a life without dignity.

You religious folk just can’t bear the thought that as my son emerges from the hell that was his childhood he might like to find a lifelong companion and have a measure of happiness....You use religion to abdicate your responsibility to be thinking human beings.

I don’t know why my son is gay, but I do know that God didn’t put him, and millions like him, on this Earth to give you someone to abuse. God gave you brains so that you could think, and it’s about time you started doing that.

They still haven't.....

But what a letter. Still as powerful today as it was eight years ago.

When Andrew Tobias, the Treasurer of the Democratic National Committee put it on his website he called it "The Best Thing I've Read All Year."

But I thought the best tribute came from someone who sent in a comment to the post I linked to....which simply said:

"I wish she was my mother."

You can't say more than that.

And you you can't say it better than mum did.....