From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 1996 01:02:27 -0500

**********************
NEWS YOU WON'T SEE ON TV

Syndicated column by Patricia Nell Warren

Patricia Nell Warren wrote "The Front Runner" and other bestselling novels.
 Her current publisher is Wildcat Press.  Her books are available from Ingram
and other trade distributors.

******************************************************************************

******************************************************************************

*********************************************

IN MEMORY OF STEVEN WILSON   by Patricia Nell Warren
11/15/95

 I want to tell you about  a 9-year-old boy named Steven Wilson.  

Steven lived in Middletown, Delaware.  Around the town, little Steven was
known as a kid who liked  to play with dolls. Other kids teased him  and
called him "fag."  Nobody knows if Steven was really gay.  The point is, he
was perceived as gay -- at the age of 9. Evidently the local school district
did little to discourage this kind of harassment.   Evidently he had a
special problem  with the Harden boys across the street. One day in
mid-October, the younger Harden boy was teasing him once again.  Steven
scuffled with him.   When Mrs. Harden came out, he was winning, sitting on
top of his tormentor and pummeling him and choking him.

A couple of days later, after Steven had been missing, his body was found in
a muddy ditch a mile from his house.  Steven had been brutally raped,  beaten
and  drowned.

The town went into shock.  Even more shocking was this...the perpetrator was
not an adult pedophile, or a serial killer.  Lamont Harden, the 15-year-old
brother of the kid Steven had beaten up, confessed to the deed.  Rape and
murder was Harden's chosen course,  to humble "the fag" who bested his little
brother.

The shock in  this murder is not merely that it happened -- but that it got
so little media coverage.  Today  Americans are so driven by the media that
we have a national heart attack if a child falls down a well and is rescued
after hours of suspense.  Indeed, child welfare is an overriding emotional
issue.  We go into a collective frenzy every time a Susan Smith murders her
children.  National headlines proliterate when  a tot  is blown away  in an
L.A. drive-by.  TV cameras show us the candles and flowers proliferating on a
sidewalk where a young person died violently, as a mourning public pays
tribute.  

Yet  the Steven Wilson murder has been swallowed up by a strange silence.
Why?   The reason is clear.   Not enough people care.   Not enough people are
interested in justice for a boy who played with dolls.

Prosecutors are asking that the teenage murderer go to prison for life.   But
the cold workings of our judicial system will not bring "justice" to Steven
Wilson's spirit.  

Real justice has to happen in people's hearts.  How can a nation do justice
to a 9-year-old when so many people are abysmally indifferent to the fact of
his violation and murder?   All too many Americans feel in their hearts  that
it is somehow "okay" for a 9-year-old child who played with dolls to be
sodomized and beaten to a pulp.   The little bastard deserved it.  Serves him
right.   In the words of General Phil Sherman, when he was questioned about
his troops slaughtering brownskinned tribal  children, "Nits make lice."

As long as some influential Americans insist that "justice" is  a
3000-year-old list on some stone tablets, with homosexuality chiseled among
the capital offenses, there can be no real justice for the Steven Wilsons.
As long as some Americans insist that "homosexuality is evil," those citizens
will share a collective responsibility for the victims of gay-bashing.
Dishonesty about "what the Bible teaches"  is a major cause of gay-bashing.
Eight of the 10 Commandments call for the death penalty.   Death  by burning
or stoning  is mandated for DOZENS  of other "offenses" -- the list is quite
long. To say that these Bible laws are literal truth for America today, is to
ensure that violence against gay people of all ages will continue.  Most
especially, violence against gay youth  will continue. 

 Today, because of this kind of teaching, many Americans remain obsessively
hostile  to homosexuality.  Yet  "Biblical crimes" of equal magnitude -- like
adultery, worshipping another God,  not being virgin on your wedding night if
you're a girl, swearing, and working on Sunday -- are no longer punished by
death.  If tomorrow every state made swearing or adultery a felony punishable
by death, we'd have to kill half the country.    Any American who insists
that our moral law and penal law be based on the Old Testament is asking for
a national blood bath. 

Steven Wilson certainly perished in a blood bath of one. 

Paradoxically,  a person can be a good Christian without being a homophobe.
Why?  Because Jesus himself said nothing against  homosexuality. 

This country has a crying, screaming need to acknowledge its national
accountability for the violence against gay children.  There are too many
parents, police, schools, clergy -- who not only overlook but encourage the
brutalizing of gay youth.  Indeed, there are even parents who beat their own
children when they learn they are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender. One
girl I know was assaulted by every member of her family before she was
finally flung onto the street....at the age of 13.   Even the media and the
courts have offered little help.

 Recently a Wisconsin federal judge dismissed a lawsuit  that  a gay student
brought against his former school. From seventh to eleventh grade, James
Nabozny suffered from verbal and physical brutalizing.  Other students
ambushed him in the hall or the bathroom.  They beat him, punched and kicked
him, even urinated on him.  On one occasion, some boys pinned Nabozny to the
floor and acted out sexual acts with him, while the rest of the class
watched.   Although his parents supported him, and complained to the
principal, the school did nothing.  "Boys will be boys," was the callous
comment of officials.   Nabozny stood it for four years.  But finally he
dropped out of school, and attempted suicide.  Eventually he was diagnosed
with "post traumatic stress disorder."  PTSD used to be called "shell shock,"
and it is typical of soldiers who have experienced the extremes of carnage in
battle.

This case is now being appealed.  It is but one of thousands, every year,
that shows how low our society will sink to keep gay youth in the closet. The
fact is, many gay kids are  lucky to get out of school alive. Steven Wilson
did not have that kind of luck.

My question is this:  how many more Stevens will die before Americans see the
need to protect gay youth?  

Hopefully there are listeners out there who are feeling uneasy on hearing my
story.  Maybe they are suddenly remembering actions of their own, feeding
the climate that killed an innocent  9-year-old.   Maybe a parent, or school
board member, or preacher.  Maybe even another kid.   Hopefully they have the
courage and compassion  to light a candle somewhere, and leave a few flowers
for Steven.  

Maybe they will love real justice enough to do something about the problem.

Maybe some other child, boy or girl, will not be assaulted or murdered
because somebody, somewhere, had a change of heart.

******************************************************************************

**********************Copyright 1995 by Patricia Nell Warren.  Permission
granted for Internet posting of the above commentary.  All other rights
reserved.  Permission to reprint in print media must be obtained from the
author.  For information, email [email-masked]

******************************************************************************

*****************