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In California, a 15-year old student, Lawrence King, has been killed by a 14-year old classmate who belonged to a clique that bullied and harassed him over his gender expression and sexual preference. It’s always difficult to blog about this sort of travesty, as on the surface, it seems impossible to say anything beyond how horrible it is.

Sometimes that’s enough.

But sometimes you also get to point to hopeful signs such as the 1000 young people who marched to commemorate him in Oxnard.

And then there’s the hard work of trying to somehow make something meaningful of the tragedy. It’s easy to see that violent acts like this are outrageous; it’s harder to see how smaller daily acts contribute to a climate in which young people come to see such violence as acceptable; any contribution, approval, or silence that may be taken as approval for discrimination and when a set of people is seen as acceptable to discriminate against– or as less human– the acceptability of violence against them increases. This means that those of us who are outraged by such events have a duty to speak up against the language of hate (when we can do so without putting ourselves in physical danger); this particular instance revolves around LGBTQ issues, but the same principle applies in other cases. We have a responsibility to insist on laws that treat all people equally: marriage equality is an example of this.

And finally, we must commemorate those who have lost their lives due (in part) to social failures to demonstrate that all lives are equal. This is as true in this case as it was in the case of Katie McCarron and all those who have been stigmatized.

EDIT: It appears that mainstream media coverage of this tragedy has begun to pick up with a February 23rd New York Times article.

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