And here is someone who was not a head of state who had a deeply personal investment in that promise of freedom and dignity, Jamey Rodemeyer of Buffalo, New York.
He died Sunday by suicide after the bullying got worse at his school after he made this video.
There are many around the world who believe that Jamey and his family are but a small price to pay for a purer simpler world for those who claim dominion over it.
So, what kind of world do you want to live in?
Do you want a world where everyone, including people like Jamey, can lay their claim upon it and make their own lives in peace?
Or, do you want a world reshaped and purified according to some ideological or doctrinal template where only those who fit perfectly have any real claim upon the world, and others are simply expendable, others like Jamey?
In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor -- anywhere in the world.
That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called “new order” of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.
To that new order we oppose the greater conception -- the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.
--President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, January 6, 1941
4 comments:
I was thrilled and surprised to hear President Obama say what he did! Again, a reason I will vote for him again!
I was almost in tears over Jamey's suicide. He was such a beautiful boy and the lose is beyound anything anyone can comprehend. I was a suicidal child and teen and 20 something. I was bullied and I am LUCKY I am stiill here! The potential of the kids we are loseing is more than ANYONE will ever be able to calculate. This has to stop!!
I am amazed to see and hear the unequivocal and public support of a sitting President of the United States for LGBT rights, my rights. That's something that I thought I'd never see.
Jamey Rodemeyer's suicide and the suicides of so many gay teens touch a very painful nerve, certainly for me. I attempted suicide myself and age 16, and thank God I failed at it. That's the terrible burden of being so young; what you experience in your immediate surroundings is all that you really know of the world. And when all that you really know is telling you that you are worse than worthless, then that's so hard to resist, even with a family that loves and supports you. I certainly felt that way, and I remember it vividly despite a lifetime of trying to forget.
As much respect (and support!) as I have for the President . . . can someone tell me when, in the 9 minute speech, the mention of LGBTs is?
Thanks, (time-saving) JCF.
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RIP, Jamey. You left us too soon. We demand JUSTICE in your name!
He mentions it at about 5:38 on the YouTube. It goes by fast, but it is clear and unequivocal.
I don't know if it's a sad measure of progress or not, but the suicide rate has always been sky high among gay kids. People are just now beginning to notice and to miss what they have always been losing.
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