Last month we were among the first to report on the Twitter meme, “to my unborn child,” or, #tomyunbornchild in Twitter speak. Literally at least one hundred tweets from people promising to kill their unborn children if they were born gay were posted. While the majority of the thousands of tweets were not vile, disgusting, homophobic, sick, violent, unimaginable, twisted, evil, and despicable posted by sub-humans, far too many were. The owner of the Twitter account @homophobes put together a Storify list of the tweets, which we included in our reporting.
READ:Â 100 Shocking Tweets From People Who Say They Will Murder Their Gay Child
Some of the tweets?
#ToMyUnbornChild if you so much as think about being a homosexual I’ll put a bullet in your damn skull
#ToMyUnbornChild I Will Put A Bullet Through Your Skull If You Become Gay…
#tomyunbornchild the first time you experience your gay moment I’m stepping on your throat #fuckwitme
One enterprising and supportive Raleigh, North Carolina woman, Charlotte Moore — who is @cavaticat Twitter – decided to take a few of those tweets and film actors playing expectant parents saying them. The script was ready made. Your response will not be as easy.
“Reading their bile, the only thing I could think was: how would we feel if we heard actual parents saying this to actual children?,” Moore writes on the YouTube page, and adds:
I got the idea on a Thursday. By Sunday, we — me, my boyfriend, and whatever friends we could find to help us — had it filmed.
It’s easy to dehumanize hate speech online because we’ve gotten so used to seeing it. We tell ourselves that it’s the product of trolls, of random, anonymous strangers.
Except they’re not. They’re real people. Many of them will be parents. And some of their children will be gay.
But what can we DO about it? I don’t think there are any easy answers.
Whenever you believe life begins, I hope we can all agree: life is essential, and rare, and precious. We can’t stop anyone from having kids. But we can resolve to stop this toxic cycle. We can wish better for our own children. And we can support the kids who weren’t so lucky.
Hate speech is hate speech, but when it’s audible rather than written, it has far greater impact.
By the way, coincidentally, North Carolina is enmeshed in its own #tomyunbornchild battle. Voters in that state next month will decide whether they want to tell their born and unborn LGBT children not that they will kill them, but whether or not they will kill their dreams to be married.
To be honest, I imagined the people who tweeted the anti-gay #tomyunbornchild tweets to be far less nice than the actors portraying them.
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Hat tip: Equalitopia