Roseanne Barr sorry for linking Osmond’s Mormonism w/ her son’s suicide

Leave it to Roseanne Barr to offend a family after a tragedy. The acerbic 57 year-old comedianne blogged two days after Marie Osmond’s son committed suicide that he was gay and that his depression was due to his family’s involvement in the Mormon church, which teaches that homosexuality is a choice and that sex outside a male-female marriage is wrong. Barr wrote:

“Marie Osmond’s poor gay son killed himself. He had been told how wrong and how sick he was every day of his life by his church and the people in it. Calling that ‘depression’ is a lie!”

“Yet the Osmonds still talk lovingly about their church, saying nothing about it’s extremely anti-gay crusade. Marie also has a gay daughter! Hey I want her and all the gay kids in the world to know that they are just fine being gay and that they deserve love and respect instead of insults and rebuke! I have gay people in my family and my circle of friends and I am kicking bigot a** and taking names!”

[via Starpulse]

Now, Barr could be correct in that 18 year-old Michael Bryan was having issues with his identity because of the religion with which he was raised. The thing is, we don’t know if Bryan was gay or not and his friend to whom he addressed his suicide note claims she’s 100% certain that he was not. Barr brings up a good point, that many religions, particularly Mormonism, make young gay people feel inadequate and can contribute to suicide among gay people who have been taught that the way they are is somehow wrong or their fault. She shouldn’t have attached that message to such a recent tragedy though, and Barr realizes this. She penned a long apology that is more carefully written that her usual stream of consciousness style. Here’s part of what she wrote:

I saw on the front page of a tabloid that he had killed himself because he could not handle being gay, and I wrote about how angry that made me, after seeing it hundreds of times, growing up as I did in Utah. I don’t know the Osmonds, but was always offended at their constant defense of the indefensible things that their church does, the way it promotes hatred and racism and sexism, tax free.

I have known so many gay people who killed themselves, or suffered and that is why I put myself on the line to bring TV’s first gay characters to America. I never intended for my comments to be picked up and broadcast on sleazy gossip TV shows, or on other blogs. That was done without my consent or knowledge.

I always intended that my remarks are directed to Power, and always on behalf of its victims. I am sorry to have hurt Marie Osmond, who is the most open minded person in her whole family. I really apologize to her. I thought about waiting to say what I had to say, but then I thought that perhaps there was no better time to add to the conversations in America about homophobia.

Alot of people know they are gay at age three, and I just feel that is why parents should keep little ones away from organizations that tell them from an early age that they are sick and going to hell and not worth the love of God. That is so vile, and a large part of the reason that I never sent my own kids to any synagogue or other religious place ever. You never know if your kids are gay, and aside from that, why would you want to take any of them to a place to learn about God, that teaches hate?

I really encourage parents to stop destroying their children by doing that. It is not good family values. Being gay is not a choice. I didn’t choose to be straight anymore than my siblings chose to be gay, or we chose to be born Jews in SLC, where we were all tormented daily by hateful Mormon neighbors (not all of them were hateful, but too many were).
Anyway, I apologize again for having added to another mother’s pain, and have asked myself if I should have said nothing at all, or waited a while to say what I said. I really don’t know. I think it’s good to get people talking about being more aware of what we accept, and i know that my comments got people talking.

[From Roseanne Barr’s blog]

I agree with Roseanne that we need to bring light to the fact that these churches are preaching intolerance. The Mormon church funded 50-75% of the campaign for Prop8 that ultimately banned same sex marriage in California. What good is it to deny families legal rights that should be guaranteed them? Still, Roseanne was wrong to bring Marie Osmond’s terrible loss into it, and she realizes that. Her apology seemed sincere to me. Reading the rest of her blog kind of bummed me out, though. I’m liberal but I try to keep my head up and not get too depressed about the way the country, and the world, is headed. (It helps a lot that I have a job and health insurance that I don’t pay for out of pocket. I’ve done that and it was a fortune.) Barr isn’t looking on the bright side at all, though, and it’s all bad to her. I doubt that much would be different under Hilary as she claims, but we’ll never know.