48 Percent of Americans who say they oppose gay marriage; the first time in 15 years of polling that fewer...
When Gabriel Haggray was a ninth grader at Salem High School in Conyers, Ga., he said he was bullied incessantly and would often go home after school and sit in his bedroom sobbing alone, feeling worthless.
“It was horrible. In gym class they would take my gym shorts or when I was in my gym clothes they would steal my street clothes,” he remembered. “One guy would always take my lunch, call me a fag and ask why I was still around.”
At first, Haggray said he “just took it” — he just put up with the bullying. Eventually he got tired of it and sought someone to listen to him as he dealt with the insecurity of being gay as well as finding a way to stop being bullied.
Fortunately, Haggray was able to find an empathetic counselor who presided over peer mediation with two of the boys who were bullying him, he said.
Georgia LGBT groups were up in arms this week after an anti-gay death threat in an online forum was tracked back to the office of Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.). Georgia Equality, the state’s largest LGBT political group, organized supporters to call Chambliss’ local offices around the state, while the upstart Queer Justice League demanded that Chambliss apologize.
“We want an official, contrite apology for Senator Chambliss, to the LGBT community and to all Georgians,” QJL’s Art Izzard said in a press release. “We also want Sen. Chambliss to commit to engaging his employees in sensitivity training, to equip them to better handle the concerns of his constituents.”
Efforts to allow gays to serve openly in the U.S. military received a serious setback Sept. 21, when the U.S. Senate rejected a motion to break a Republican-led filibuster against an annual defense spending bill that includes language aimed at ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”
The vote was 56 to 43 — four votes short of ending the filibuster. Georgia’s two U.S. senators, Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson, both Republicans, voted in the majority to stymie the repeal.
Aubrey Sarvis, executive director of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, called the vote a “frustrating blow.”