I just saw this article in the news and I thought it´s so heartbreaking:

Gay Teen Commits Suicide

"Brandon Elizares, a 16-year-old from El Paso, Tex., took his own life early this month after being bullied and threatened at school because of his sexuality, KVIA-TV reports.

"My name is Brandon Joseph Elizares and I couldn´t make it," his suicide note read, according to the station. "I love you guys with all of my heart."

This brings me to the topic of hatred towards people are might be a little different then the majority and how heartless and cruel people can be to them even to the point that these people would decide to take their own lives. This is especially prevalent in religious or conservative societies, interestingly! They tend to be LESS compassionate and accepting towards others!!

Some studies say that 30-40% of gay/lesbian youth have attempted suicide. What are we doing to them as a society? 

Until our laws reflect true tolerance, how can we expect society to?  We can put pretty words in our constitution about equality and rights of individuals but until we live them, they don´t really mean anything. 

I think its terribly sad that a young person feels badly enough about themselves to committ suicide.  However, as a society we are always telling people that what they are not good enough, or it is wrong.  Look at all the young girls starving themselves to be thinner...look at all the young people getting plastic surgery - not because they need to correct a physical problem -  but because they feel bad about how they look and just want to look different.  It´s all the same monster of not being able to accept who we are as individuals and as a society.   

The reason why the issue with Homosexuals became such an big issue is people just couldn´t/can´t mind their own business. They forced the issue. I really don´t want to know what people do in the private parts of their lives, and I am not into digging and peeping through their keyholes to find out. 

However there are individuals who are born with various gender markers other than just "male" and "female".  Society has to come to terms with this. Particulary in today´s world where we all have been exposed to, injested and absorbed hormone distruptors. Added to that is the issue of in-vitro fertilization which has been found to increase the incidence of human chimeras

"In 1953 a human chimera was reported in the British Medical Journal. A woman was found to have blood containing two different blood types. Apparently this resulted from cells from her twin brother living in her body.[10] More recently, a study found that such blood group chimerism is not rare. Another report of a human chimera was published in 1998, where a male human had some partially developed female organs due to chimerism. He was conceived by in-vitro fertilization.  In 2006 a woman was denied public assistance when DNA evidence showed that she was not related to her children. After hearing of  a human chimera in New England, it was eventually found that she too was a chimera and thus had two sets of DNA."

I don´t believe these people deserve to be punished. On the other hand those who gossip and conjecturize about others should be punished IMHO

Hm, had the blank post problem again I was already shocked last year to hear that 10% of the Dutch gay youth had thought about suicide (opposed to 5% of straight youth), so hearing that in the US it is around 30% is a disaster. I think hearing about your sexuality in the news every day, as a political topic, doesn´t help these kids. To hear some politician say that he will ban gay marriage, and thus influencing your future and your rights MUST have an effect. The US is supposed to be the land of the free, the land of opportunity. How does equal rights for gay couples not fit in that picture? If people would stop talking about being gay as being an "alternative lifestyle" or a "choice", than perhaps these kids would feel more accepted, and the others bullying these kids would have nothing to bully about.

Right now there are making laws in Holland to teach about gay and straight to young kids in school. It will not be about sexuality, but more about the fact that it IS possible for two men or two women to love eachother. It should be the duty of the parents to teach this, but with the ever changing society this family-teaching is becoming less and less.

I agree with that, and totally oppose these things.. especially advertising to young/teenage people, especially girls (of course, since society is obsessed with telling women what they need to look, act, think like!). However, I do think that bullying on the basis of gender identity is a step further. It involves explicit acts of violence and emotional attacks on the whole person. These individuals, on top of facing physical threats, also face being told by the society that they are ´abnormal´, something is fundamentally wrong with them.. etc - I think this is the worst part of it. People need society/ group to function.

With girls, we tell them, you´re not ok, unless you do all these things (basically become our sex object), and pretty much all girls do something to reach that goal... just so that they are seen as part of the group and are approved by the society.