Suicides Used in Culture Wars

From WorldNetDaily, last month:

A New York man is linking the suicide of his 22-year-old son, a military veteran who had bright prospects in, to the anti-Christian book “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins after a college professor challenged the son to read it.

“Three people told us he had taken a biology class and was doing well in it, but other students” and the professor were really challenging my son, his faith. They didn’t like him as a Republican, as a Christian, and as a conservative who believed in intelligent design,” the grief-stricken father, Keith Kilgore, told WND about his son, Jesse.

…The first inkling of a reason for the suicide came, Keith Kilgore told WND, when one of Jesse’s friends came to visit after word of his son’s death circulated.

“She was in tears [and said] he was very upset by this book,” Keith Kilgore said. “‘It just destroyed him,’ were her words.

From This is Bristol (UK):

A Bristol teenager who killed himself with painkillers was upset that his school had sidelined Christianity in favour of “alternative religions”, an inquest heard.

…Mr Tucker, 53, an ex-marine, told the inquest in Flax Bourton his son had problems at St Katherine’s comprehensive school, in Pill, over a number of issues.

He said:…”He was deeply concerned that his religious education consisted mainly of alternative religions and ignored Christianity.

“The religious education concentrated on the Muslim faith at the expense of Christianity.”

Both cases have predicably been seized on by certain elements of the right as evidence for the need to re-Christianize education; of course, the reality of the motives for the suicides are somewhat more complicated. Tucker was

…also troubled by what he saw as unfair detentions, his sexuality, and the fact his mother’s ex-partner threatened to burn down the family home in his early childhood.

Kilgore, meanwhile, was a self-described “culure warrior” who appears to have enjoyed and invited religio-political debate.

One Response

  1. Death by Dawkins now?

    Good grief…

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