What a day". i thought that waking up at 9:48 and being 15
mins late to work was going to be the biggest problem today. but i didn't know
that my biggest problem was going to be getting disowned and kicked out of my
home of almost twenty years. to add insult to injury my step mother punched me
in the face repeatedly with my grandmother cheering her along. i am still in
complete shock and disbelief.
- Daniel
Ashley Pierce, on Facebook
It could
have been worse: Daniel could have been living in 1990 and dying of AIDS.
Within
two days, the trauma caused by Daniel's Pierce's relatives exploded onto the
internet with almost 4 million views. Like a crash sight, people were drawn to
it and to share the pathos of the scene: Pierce, 20, was called upon by his
family for an "intervention" which escalated to violence. He had told
his family that he was gay, but when he refused to go through "reparative
therapy", they showered him with verbal abuse, hit him, then cast him out
of the house - and out of the family. To some, the video (which he recorded
with his cell phone), is too much to view.
"...
we love you ..."
The
"I love you" that Mrs. Pierce first utters is, of course, the
ubiquitous phrase taught to people for purposes of intervention. She later
demonstrates that she would never have had the sincerity nor the imagination to
say it had it not be part of her "required reading". Mrs. Pierce, in
other words, is not that bright.
She is
also irrational throughout the whole episode: at first, after we hear that she
"loves him", we hear that she "knew" he was gay from the
time he was a baby, but then she says that he made a choice (wtf?!?). All this
before she slams him in the face. Maybe this was her version of "tough
love", but if you knew that your son was different as a tiny baby, just
who did she love all that time and how could it have been a choice? She also
states that she has gay friends. Right.
Righteous
arrogance of that sort brings out the irrational.
Perhaps
the most startling point of the episode is that Pierce's family has never been
very religious:
[Pierce's aunt Teri] Cooper says that despite their reliance on
scripture in rejecting one of their own, Pierce's family is not especially religious, and does not
regularly attend church services.
So the "word of God", it seems, was more excuse than
conviction.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).