Alabama Dad Who Lost 23 Year Old Gay Daughter to Suicide Protests Against Roy Moore: ‘How Is My Daughter a Pervert?’

‘If He Called Her a Pervert He Called Your Child a Pervert if She Was Gay, or Your Son Was Gay’

Monday night 74-year old Nathan Mathis stood outside the Roy Moore’s campaign rally in Midland City, Alabama to protest the accused child molester and former state Supreme Court Chief Justice with a compelling sign.

But it is his two-minute interview with reporters that has taken the nation’s heart in a video that has gone viral.

Mathis, who appeared to be alone outside the Moore rally, held up a large photo of his late daughter who he says was gay, and died by suicide. And he blames people like Roy Moore who label gay people “preverts,” or perverts, for contributing to her death.

“Judge Roy Moore called her a pervert for one reason: because she was gay,” Mathis charged. “If he called her a pervert he called your child a pervert if she was gay, or your son was gay,” he said, in a sad, wistful voice. 

“This is something people need to stop and think about,” Mathis said. “You’re supposed to uphold the Constitution. The Constitution said all men were created equal. But how is my daughter a pervert just because she’s gay?” 

He says he is a man of faith who also was anti-gay, and said things to his daughter, Tami Sue, he wishes he had not.

“I said bad things to my daughter myself, which I regret,” he said. “But I can’t take back what happened to my daughter. Stuff like saying my daughter was a pervert, I’m sure that bothered her.”

And he says that Moore has called “all gay people perverts. Abominations. That’s not true.”

Mathis, who later told reporters he was “cold and nervous,” says he doesn’t know if showing up accomplished anything, and he had “mixed emotions about coming,” but “somebody needs to speak up.”

“If it’s all to no avail, so be it,” he added.

The Washington Post adds that “Mathis wrote about his daughter in a letter to the Dothan Eagle, a small Alabama newspaper, in 2012.”

Born in 1972, she was “a wonderful child” who was “very athletic, tomboyish (I always had to pitch batting practice to her after Dixie Youth practice), very beautiful and smart,” he wrote. But after he learned that she was gay from a friend while she was in high school, he confronted her and “said some things to her that still eat on me to this day,” he wrote, though he later apologized.

A few years later, she killed herself. Mathis wrote that he found her; she was 23.

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