How Many More Deaths from School Bullying?

One of the worst things done by the ever-more vicious anti-gay radicals infecting religion and politics is to block and/or fight (to the death) legislation to create safe schools for GLBT kids AND THOSE PERCEIVED or ACCUSED (as if it's a crime) to be lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.

It's one thing for them to hold up the recent, vacuous, inarticulate almost-Miss USA as some kind of martyr for their cause ("She didn't get to be a beauty queen because she's against gay marriage!"), but it's quite another to insidiously fight against programs to help kids stay safe in their own schools.

This is from Bilirico:

When one of my NCLR staffers forwarded me a news article today, I thought it must have been a mistake. It detailed the suicide of an eleven-year-old boy who hung himself after relentless bullying at school. I had just read an identical article last week--the heartbreaking story about Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, who, after suffering constant bullying at school, came home and committed suicide. I thought, this can't be happening again. But the article was no mistake, this is now two reported suicides in the last week alone.

Jaheem Herrera was eleven and lived in Georgia. Carl was also eleven and lived in Massachusetts. Both boys suffered the same taunts, bullying and harassment, including anti-gay epithets and attacks and both felt the same desperate need for the pain and suffering to end. Their deaths, so utterly senseless and wrong , fill me with grief, but also anger and determination. These children deserved to attend school without fear and suffering. They had a right to education, a right to safety, a right to dignity and a right to walk the hallways of their schools without dread.

And from Towleroad:

Ellen DeGeneres talked to the mother of 'bullycide' victim Carl Walker-Hoover yesterday on her show, and Anderson Cooper discussed the problem of bullying in schools, the and the other tragic recent 'bullycide' of Jaheem Herrera.