AKA William

This is just awful.

Sirdeaner L. Walker, the mother of 11-year-old Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, found her son hanging by an extension cord on the second floor of their home Monday night after he had endured another day of taunting at New Leadership Charter School, where he was a new sixth-grader.

Other students made Carl a target, daily calling him gay, making fun of how he dressed and threatening him, she said.

Walker phoned the school repeatedly since Carl began attending the school but the bullying continued.

On Monday, Walker said Carl told her that he accidentally hit a TV at the school with his backpack and the TV bumped into a girl, who shouted at him and threatened him with harm. He called his mother after school and said he had gotten a five-day suspension, she said.

School officials denied the incident had prompted a five-day suspension, said Walker, who nonetheless remains upset at what she said was the school’s pattern unresponsiveness.

“I called there every week,” she said. [MassLive.com]

An 11-year-old child. Hanged himself.

When I read horrible stories like this one, I am reminded absolutely of the necessity of passing laws that make gay marriage legal to announce to the world that we different-from-the-majority gay people are as valuable and necessary to this world as straight people.