Because of the new law that Republican lawmakers passed and Gov. Mike DeWine signed, more Ohio teens will have to come out to families that don’t want them. This will make more Ohio teens homeless.
Helpers told them what would happen if teens were forced to come out while living in dangerous places. Members of the Ohio School Psychologists Association and the Ohio School Counselors Association spoke out against the bill and said it goes against the professional ethics rules of the National Association of School Psychologists.
Three hundred Ohioans spoke out against the bill, more than one hundred times as many as spoke in favor of it.
That didn’t matter to DeWine or the Republicans in Ohio.
Because they wanted to make a political point, they hurt LGBTQ+ people. They don’t care who they hurt or how much they hurt to do it.
In this case, they are hurting young people who are weak and who are already facing open, vicious, and constant hatred in the United States.
So it’s not a surprise that more LGBTQ+ teens and young adults in Ohio are calling crisis hotlines.
WCMH’s David Rees reports that on January 8, the day DeWine signed the bill, 579 calls came in from LGBTQ+ teens and young adults in Ohio to the Rainbow Youth Project USA Foundation’s crisis hotline. That’s more than the average of 284 calls a month from Ohio.
The average for the month almost doubled in one day.
There are a lot of LGBTQ+ teens and young adults who feel safer at school than at home. The Trevor Project surveyed in 2022 and found that only 32% of trans kids felt safe at home, while 51% thought school was a safe place.
Even though only half of the time was school seen as a safe place, Ohio Republican lawmakers and DeWine would not stand it. That too has become a place where people are afraid, which makes young people who already feel very alone and confused feel even worse.
Why do not all of them feel safe at home? Well, a study from Lesley University found that more than one in four LGBTQ+ teens are forced to leave their houses when they tell their parents they are gay or lesbian.
To keep from being kicked out of their homes, many LGBTQ+ teens stay hidden until they can get away from places that are harmful, intolerant, or cruel.
Everyone agrees that forcing someone out of the closet is always wrong, but doing it when their safety is at risk is the worst. That’s why all the experts are against these kinds of laws.
Making LGBTQ+ teens come out often ends up leaving them without a place to live.
The National Coalition for the Homeless says that a study from the Williams Institute School of Law at UCLA found that 17% of LGBTQ people had been homeless at some point in their lives, and 20% of those people had been homeless before they turned 18. The poll from the Williams Institute also found that 68% of LGBTQ+ people who answered had been rejected by their families.
A study from Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago found that LGBTQ kids have more than twice the risk of being homeless as their non-LGBTQ peers. This is often because of rising tensions in the home over time. The study found ways to help, but it also found that LGBTQ+ kids who are homeless are twice as likely to die before their 20th birthday.
Also, about 64% of LGBTQ+ homeless kids had to deal with sexual abuse from family members, 62% had their bodies hurt by other people, 25% hurt themselves, and 38% were forced to have sex. All of those numbers were much higher than those of their non-LGBTQ+ peers, and some were almost twice as high.
Do DeWine and the Republicans in Ohio know any of this? Do they care?
It’s clear not.
Politicians care more about spreading lies and fear about LGBTQ+ people and transphobia as a cultural wedge to stir up lies, fear, paranoia, hate, and division during election season than about this human suffering.
I talked to LGBTQ+ teens who were kicked out of their homes by intolerant families when I was a writer, so this isn’t just an idea to me. These are Ohioans with hopes, dreams, and joy who want to live their lives as they really are, without fear, pain, insult, hatred, and hate all the time.
No matter what excuses they try to use, Ohio Republican lawmakers and Mike DeWine have made laws that will hurt and hurt real people in ways that these careless politicians have never even come close to going through.
They stain themselves and our state with their cruelty by putting other people through so much pain and making more useless suffering happen in the world.
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