Dan Savage and his husband Terry Miller founded the It Gets Better Project in 2010 to give hope to LGBTQ teens, a population that experiences bullying and that has a suicide rate more than double that of the general population. That extraordinarily high rate is based only on cases where teens were self-identified or identified by surviving family members as LGBTQ, so the real number is probably higher. It follows a similar project in the late 1990’s called the Trevor Project. The suicide rate is higher still, eight times as high, among those subjected to “conversion therapy,†a scam in which evangelical extremists convince anxious parents that they can “straighten out†their kids. The legislature failed last year to have Maine join the fourteen US states that currently ban the practice, though we have great hopes for the coming term.
The late Harvey Milk talked about hope all the time. Referring to gay teens like the boy who called him from Altoona, Pennsylvania, Milk said “You got to give them hope. Hope for a better world. Hope for a better tomorrow.†The It Gets Better Project offers hope to the frightened.
Hope is the theme for this first week in Advent. We need hope during the inevitable time between, the time between recognizing the need to ban a cruel practice like the brainwashing and self-hatred that is conversion therapy or to address a wrong like systemic racism, and the eventual realization of justice and love as the result of selfless service by those who dream of a better world. Continue reading “For the Time Being: December 2, 2018”