Like most of you, I spend my mornings combing through the "real" news looking for a story, a tidbit even, that sheds some light. Not easy. The Pacific Standard magazine, however, offered something that reminded me to straighten my spine, to buck up: Thanks to the legalization of same-sex marriages, teen suicide rates are down... significantly.
The initial statistics are startling: A 2015 survey (in JAMA Pediatrics) discovered that 29% of LGBT students tried to end their lives (compared to 6% of hetero students) "within the past 12 months." Thanks to the 2015 Supreme Court decision (a decision that is now in grave jeopardy), that rate fell by 14%. Overall, 134,000 teen lives may have been saved because 134,000 adolescents didn't attempt suicide. The link between the destigmatization of one's sexuality through legal marriage for all and saving lives is so obvious, so sweeping, so necessary, that the threats of changing policies and revoking human rights are proving, daily, to be not just a matter of life and death, but a matter of MANY lives and MANY deaths.
This is another example of why we must resist to persist.
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