Given that roughly 150 persons aged 15 to 19 die at their own hands every month in America, the word “plague” seems hyperbolic. One would prefer that there were no deaths at all in this age. As the father of two Americans aged 15 to 19, I should prefer it very much indeed. This is a fallen world, though, and death is part of the package. That some fraction of one percent of our dead teens was driven to self-destruction by shame at being “gay” (was ever a word less apt?) is not, it seems to me, something a rational citizen should dwell on if not directly affected.

Newsweek joined in the chorus of ululation with a piece titled “Is the ‘Bullying Epidemic’ a Media Myth?” They left readers in no doubt as to their opinion:

The Clementi case in particular is sure to become latest potent symbol for why, in the digital age, schools need bullying policies and states need legislation to punish bullies.

Of course they do! Our moronic politicians, fresh from their exertions at debasing our currency and wrecking our economy, are eager to oblige”€”to bring forth new laws, regulations, and policies to arrest and reverse the plague that is scything down our youth in hecatombs. Senator Frank Lautenberg will introduce national legislation that “would require colleges and universities that receive federal student aid to adopt codes of conduct that prohibit bullying and harassment of students.” Congress will act! Obama will act! Holder will act! The UN will act! Armies will mobilize! Fleets will be dispatched! Aux armes, citoyens!

Before we try turning the world upside-down to eliminate all meanness, spite, practical joking, and mockery of personal quirks, let’s ponder the following curious fact. I’m going to assume here that the causal link between Tyler Clementi’s Skyped humiliation and his suicide has been established by all those media stories that take it for granted.

The question then arises: Why did he feel his humiliation so keenly? Or at all? How can it be that forty years of relentless homosexualist propaganda had so little effect? After all those Gay Pride parades, how is it that Clementi didn’t feel proud? Should not we all, at this point, unanimously agree that Gay Is Just As Good As Straight? Or, even if heartless, benighted old fools such as myself don”€™t agree, shouldn’t 18-year-old undergraduates such as Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei agree?

The essence of humiliation is being mocked when you know your mockers have a point. The implication of Clementi’s suicide was that he agreed with those who were mocking him. But how could that be after the decades of propaganda”€”which has nowhere been more intensive than at our residential colleges? If he had been filmed engaging with a female instead of a male, would he then have felt humiliated? Would the girl? If his polarity (dominant/submissive) in the filmed encounter had been reversed, would he still have felt humiliated?

Ah, when will the New Jerusalem at last arrive? It seems to have been just around the next corner for all of my longish life. When will class, sex, and ethnic rancor cease? When will our schools raise up every child to his full potential? When will the blight of “homophobia” be lifted at last from the human heart? When will human nature come home at last, cleansed from all blemish and fault, all meanness and mockery, washed in the blood of the lamb? When, oh when, will everything at last be equal to everything else, as we have so long been promised, and as we all so ardently desire? Perhaps Senator Lautenberg’s bill will do the trick.