All across America today there will be families traveling to go to churches and places of worship. They will walk through the doors holding their children close and teaching them the values of loving everyone and being grateful that their children are the unique and marvelous gifts to the world. They will rejoice in the ways that their children can express their own gender identities and who they can deeply love and be attracted to with their wide spectrum's of diverse sexual orientations. Then there is another group that is going into a different set of buildings. They are the ones that believe their children are owned by the parents as if they are property and must conform to a rigid extremist belief system. Just like the Taliban, they will enforce the iron handed ‘law’ and force their children to sit in the pews and become the child that they have tried to force into their ideological mold through coercion, abuse and force. I grew up in this type of hateful and twisted type of ideologies of the religious extremist fundamentalists of the Church of Christ in Marana and Tucson Arizona. My grandfather was a lay minister who taught his radical views of fundamental Christian extremism and Revelations. I sat through endless services while ministers and elders stood up in the pulpit suggesting whipping a child was the best way of discipline to force conforming to ‘God’s Laws’. I suffered the torment of writing Bible verses as a punishment, getting whipped with various objects to bend to the demands of a parent that felt she should break my will. Her one confession I heard that she told her congregation was that she felt she had sinned due to not beating me enough to make me a ‘good Christian boy’. When I was five I came out transgender with a blouse and makeup on. I have never forgotten the moment when I was grabbed up, thrust into the bathroom, my face scrubbed off and threatened that if I did it again I would burn in the everlasting fires of hell. At five years old that memory seared into my very being severely traumatized me with the violent response to showing my true gender identity at such a tender age. Sitting in a pew week after week hearing messages inferring that a transgender person is evil and that condemned to hell for eternity affected me for years. I listened to a parent tell me the evils of being a homosexual (two who were her brothers) and again was going to be tortured in hell. I cannot imagine what torture Leelah Alcorn went through. Leelah described so much in her last message to all of us of some of the tortures she endured however I’m certain she did not write all the ills her parents thrust her into. The fact that parents falsely believe that they have the right to stick a child in a tortured prison cell (bedroom) like a prisoner sickens me. Parents believing that they have a right to rip supportive and loving friends, educational hopes away from a youth and force the individual to conform to false myths ultimately resulting in the death of their child should be utterly abhorrent to any human being who is in touch with reality. Sadly, there are organizations and parents defending the torture and blaming the victim Leelah Alcorn for her need to end the torture of these religious extremists. Leelah’s not the only one though! We have HUNDREDS of stories from youth stuck in the same captive situations being abused daily by parents pleading with us for relief, wondering if they will ever escape the abuse they are suffering. To those youth- HANG IN THERE! We are coming and we are trying! Find those who love you in all the groups you can! We love you and want to support you! Sadly tomorrow, children and youth will be forced by parents with extremist religious views that they have the right to beat, confine, isolate and punish their ‘property’ into conforming to their demands against the very genetics they were born with. We cannot afford to allow these religious extremists to terrorize the youth of this nation who are simply born differently. To do so screams of a travesty against humanity is immoral and unjust. We can make a difference. We can pass a Leelah’s Law just like we did in New Jersey and California banning therapists from the brainwashing torture they attempt to inflict upon the LGBT youth of the US. We can strengthen child abuse laws that make it illegal to make an attempt to change a youths gender identity or sexual orientation. No parent should have the right to torture a child or youth. No parent should be allowed to use brainwashing techniques to traumatize and demean a child! I am heeding Leelah’s final voice - “Fix Society” . Please sign the petition and share to the world. One voice at a time we will rise until we are a shout so loud that the world will shake for justice! http://www.transrightsnow.com/images/LeelahsLaw400.png