by Rabbi Dov Fischer in The American Spectator

Yay for the Fourth of July! It now simultaneously marks a second kind of “Independence Day”: When July has just begun, that means we are finished with the annual infernal June “Pride Month” from Hell. We are free again — free at last! — from the month of non-stop media and woke corporate efforts at mass brainwashing to make us believe that homosexuality is natural and that transgenderism is normal. Isn’t it rich? Isn’t it queer? Send in the clowns. Well, maybe next year.

Throughout the just-ended “Pride Month,” our nation was bombarded with LG(B)T(QIA)+ propaganda arguing that mainstream society’s refusal to welcome the LG(B)T(QIA)+ lifestyle and embrace its members’ behaviors as mainstream are a major contributor to their suicides. (I place “B” in parentheses because they don’t even belong in the parade or public discussion; they just like the attention.) Thus, according to the LG(B)T(QIA)+ polemic, the issue is not merely one of “human rights” but of “life or death.” That makes up their strategic polemical effort to reverse the societal argument away from defending our school-age children and promoting and defending important national values of traditional married life. Instead, they condemn those who won’t “drink their Kool-Aid” as “homophobic murderers.”

LG(B)T(QIA)+ propagandists argue that, by refusing to endorse their ways and by rejecting the LG(B)T(QIA)+ lifestyle, normative society propels increased suicide among their number. Thus, if only the mainstream community would accept their often-flamboyant behaviors and preferences that are dissonant with Nature, lives would be saved because suicides would be prevented.

It is axiomatic that prejudice, bigotry, wanton hate, humiliation, and mockery are wrong. Moreover, there can be no doubt that suicide rates and ideations are higher among the LG(B)T(QIA)+ population. However, it is presumptuous to assign that problem to prejudice, bigotry, discrimination and societal refusal to embrace the lifestyle’s validity. Rather, it is far more obvious that mental illness and its often-attendant clinical depression compose a prime cause of LG(B)T(QIA)+ suicide. Sadly, the higher LG(B)T(QIA)+ suicide rates stem from mental illness and related clinical depression among those who take their own lives — and not from societal discrimination and belittling.

An example from Orthodox Judaism: Under Judaic law, suicide is forbidden. One who kills himself, therefore, is to be buried at the outer perimeter of a Jewish cemetery, a location reserved for criminals and others known to have been evil during their lifetimes. However, in actual practice, Orthodox Jews typically bury suicides not in the outskirts of cemeteries but in the main areas because rabbinic authorities usually hold, after evaluating any such tragic case, that the suicide stemmed not from apostasy but from mental illness and clinical depression, or from such excruciating physical suffering without prospects of relief that the deceased was driven beyond despair. That is, when looking at suicide purely objectively without any overlay of political polemics, it is understood that the vast majority of people who kill themselves do so because they tragically are suffering from clinical depression, mental illness, or excruciating physical pain — but not from discrimination, prejudice, bigotry, or belittling.

Looked at a different way, and without segueing off topic to comment here on anti-Semites or on anti-Semitism per se, Jews have not had a particularly notable suicide rate throughout discrete periods of some pretty bad stuff these past 2,000 years, including but not limited to Holy Temple desecrations, whole-nation expulsions, blood libels, Black Death massacres, inquisitions, ghettoes, pogroms, and the Holocaust. Even during the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions and in the Nazi death camps, the overwhelming majority of Jewish populations endeavored in all conceivable ways, at all costs, to live and even to continue practicing their Judaism as faithfully as they secretly could, even under the inquisitors’ and Nazis’ noses. In fact, despite ubiquitous Jew-hatred sustained through the ages, Jewish suicide rates always have been lower than those among the surrounding society. And Orthodox Jews, who encounter the worst of all anti-Semitism because they dress differently and often are easier to identify as outliers because of distinctive garb and comportment, have the lowest suicide rates of all Jews.

Bigotry, prejudice, and unwarranted hate are not to blame for high suicide rates among a discrete population. The data below demonstrate this. Therefore, as a corollary, one may contemplate an interesting pair of questions as worth considering:

1. Whether LG(B)T(QIA)+ orientation itself is what breeds clinical depression and mental illness in certain susceptible individuals, and…
2. Whether mental illness and clinical depression breed a tendency toward LG(B)T(QIA)+ orientation.

That is, would an average mentally balanced and emotionally stable person, without medical depression issues, grow up to be LG(B)T(QIA)+? Alternatively, does an otherwise mentally healthy person who first “experiments” but thereafter slides into an LG(B)T(QIA)+ lifestyle subsequently develop clinical depression and mental illness over time? I do not pretend to know, but these questions seem fair to ask in an open society that allows free inquiry and objective scientific study untainted by outside pressures to skew results.

LG(B)T(QIA)+ propaganda maintains that a refusal by normal people to capitulate to the demands of the homosexual/lesbian/transgender community comprises “discrimination” and “homophobia” that causes higher suicide rates among the LG(B)T(QIA)+ universe. Therefore, they argue that (i) either you must stop believing faithfully that what is unnatural is unnatural, or (ii) you are both a “homophobe” and a murderer, bearing on your shoulders full responsibility for LG(B)T(QIA)+ suicides. This is emotional blackmail, even as it is plain inaccurate.

Moreover, even assuming ridiculously that a polite, soft-spoken, understated, legitimate defense of traditional family values is actually “hatred,” “bigotry,” and “homophobia,” data culled from reliable medical sources prove unequivocally that suicide is not related to someone being in a group that is victimized by discrimination, prejudice, bigotry, and unwarranted hatred. Consider that, all politics aside, no demographic groups in America face more discrimination and bigotry than do (i) Blacks and (ii) Hispanics. By contrast, again all polemics aside, no group faces less discrimination and bigotry than do Whites.

Notwithstanding polemics that Blacks receive government set-asides and favored benefits, or that Whites are under attack by woke critical race theory advocates and leftist media who bombard Caucasians for having “White privilege,” any fair assessment recognizes that American Blacks and Hispanics face the most societal bias and unwarranted hatred, while Whites are most advantaged. Consequently, if suicide rates were related to the amount of hatred, bigotry, rejection, and “phobia” people encounter from The Other, we should expect that Blacks would have the highest suicide rates, Hispanics next high, and Whites the lowest suicide rates. The rates should not even be close.

Here are the data, which were published for the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in May 2021 and appear on the website of the National Library of Medicine’s National Center for Biotechnology Information:

The overall age-adjusted rates … indicate a decrease in suicide rates between 2018 and 2019 for White and American Indian or Alaska Native individuals, reflecting the decrease in total deaths. The age-adjusted rate increased for Black and Asian or Pacific Islander individuals. The increasing trend for these groups began in 2014; between 2014 and 2019, the suicide rate increased by 30% for Black individuals (from 5.7 to 7.4 per 100 000 individuals) and 16% for Asian or Pacific Islander individuals (from 6.1 to 7.1 per 100 000 individuals). Based on the 2014 to 2017 trend, the change between 2018 to 2019 was in the expected range for Black individuals (2019 actual: 7.4 per 100 000 individuals; expected: 7.3-8.0 per 100 000 individuals), Asian or Pacific Islander individuals (2019 actual: 7.1 per 100 000 individuals; expected: 7.0-7.5 per 100 000 individuals), and Hispanic individuals (2019 actual: 7.3 per 100 000 individuals; expected: 7.3-8.0 per 100 000 individuals), but the change was outside of the expected range for White individuals (2019 actual: 17.6 per 100 000 individuals; expected: 18.0-18.9 per 100 000 individuals), American Indian or Alaskan Native individuals (2019 actual: 22.2 per 100 000 individuals; expected: 22.5-24.6 per 100 000 individuals), and the total population (2019 actual: 13.9 per 100 000 individuals, expected: 14.3-14.7 per 100 000 individuals). [text highlights added]

(Note that American Indians are outliers because they experience disproportionate alcoholism and other addiction rates, a separate subject outside the parameters of this discussion.)

It simply is not true that LG(B)T(QIA)+ suicide rates are traceable to Americans who live and endorse normal Judeo-Christian family values and who refuse unapologetically to be intimidated or emotionally blackmailed into abandoning their deepest beliefs to accord with woke culture and its sister phenomenon, cancel culture, that threaten their jobs and their safe and deserved secure place in greater society. Rather, the LG(B)T(QIA)+ community and its woke advocates must accept that the reasons for their suicide rates lie within themselves and their own cohort. As long as those with problems — of any kind, no matter the group or the type of problems — insist on playing the role of “victim” and casting blame onto others outside their group who are happier and more comfortable in their own skin, those with problems will never solve their situations or conquer their inner demons.

Herewith the charts:

Originally published in The American Spectator