The George Washington Bridge connecting New York and New Jersey is a very long and fairly high bridge suspended over the Hudson River.
At 3500 feet, the GWB is the longest suspension bridge in the world. At 250 feet above the roiling waters of the Hudson, it’s not even close to being the highest bridge in the world but, like the Golden Gate Bridge, at the equivalent of twenty five stories high it’s more than high enough to attract suicidal individuals intent on ending their lives.
Rutgers freshman Tyler Clemente, a quiet, talented violinist, posted a notice on his Facebook page on September 22nd at 8:42 p.m. It read simply and matter-of-factly, “Jumping off the gw bridge sorry.” The native of Ridgewood, New Jersey did jump from the GWB minutes after posting that apology and after leaving personal identification on the bridge. His body was recovered a few days later.
Homosexual activists will no doubt use the death of Tyler Clemente to excoriate so-called homophobes for having caused his death. However, the proximate cause of Tyler’s suicide was his Rutgers’ dorm roommate, Dharun Ravi, and an accomplice, Molly Wei, grossly violating his privacy. They illicitly videotaped and posted to the internet Tyler’s two homosexual encounters at Rutgers within 3 days.
If blame need be assigned, Tyler Clemente would have to be blamed for taking his own life although, no matter the societal and family shame associated with homosexuality, Tyler had to have had other psychological issues to induce him to end his life at 18, issues of self-esteem, perhaps, that led him to a gay life.
As trite as it is, suicide is a needless, permanent solution for what is most often a temporary problem.
Again, if blame need be assigned, two medical groups could also be seen as responsible parties.
Until gay agitators began pressuring the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association in 1973 to cease describing homosexuality as a sickness, as “an abnormal mental disorder” and homosexuals as “sexual deviants,” that disorder was considered treatable. Once the two APA’s were intimidated into abandoning that long-standing diagnosis, a deviant disorder gradually and unfortunately morphed into a variation on the norm.
What was a politically motivated alteration of a medical diagnosis may have sated the demands of gay agitators and convinced untold numbers of gays that there was nothing wrong with them but did nothing to alleviate the evident anguish of people like Tyler Clemente.
See “Exposed: The Myth that Homosexuality is Normal,” http://tiny.cc/95g0n
Tyler’s temporary problem was probably his family discovering his homosexuality. He hadn’t “come out” to them concerning his inclinations or to being a committed gay, young man. Especially today, when homosexuals and homosexuality are pervasive–if not accepted as normal–in many sectors of our society, it may have been better if he had fessed up.
A friend from grade school, Robert Righthand, reflected on Tyler’s life and death: “I can tell you that whatever state he was in, he had it in reserve for a very long time. You never thought he was depressed. You just thought he was quiet. He wasn’t the person to open up to a lot of people:” http://tiny.cc/ssm17
Because of his reticence, no one will ever know what Tyler Clemente was thinking in those final minutes of his short life looking down at the cold waters of the Hudson or during the few seconds of his fatal plunge into the river.
May he finally rest in peace.
