The mother of a 16-year-old gay Colombian boy who committed suicide last month has come forward with shocking allegations that officials at her son’s Catholic school had bullied him to death.
According to El Espectador, Sergio Urrego had endured relentless bullying and harassment from administrators at Gimnasio Castillo Campestre, a Catholic high school in Bogota, after they confiscated his phone and discovered a photo of him kissing his boyfriend on it.
School officials reportedly blocked Urrego’s requests for transfer and forced him to visit a school psychologist. After weeks of torture, multiple class suspensions and accusations of being an “anarchist,” an “atheist” and a “homosexual,” Urrego jumped from the roof of a shopping center in Bogota.
Shortly before he took his own life, Urrego posted the lyrics to Pink Floyd’s “Goodbye Cruel World” on his Facebook wall:
“The school, Gimnasio Castillo Campestre, a Catholic institution, treated the situation in a deplorable manner,” GLAAD said in a statement. According to them, the boy’s mother is filing a complaint against the school with the help of Colombia Diversa, a local LGBT group.
Photo: Facebook
Amalgamate
religion kills yet again
QJ201
Christianity in action has no resemblance to what I was taught in both baptist bible school and catechism.
It’s when you get to about 15 you realize christianity as in institution has nothing to do with the message of Jesus. Same to you Islam and Judaism. All the same god all the same hateful bullshit.
Stache99
Poor kid didn’t have a chance though. It’s easy to see the insanity of it from a rational POV when you grow up and get away from it. They need a “It gets better” campaign in Columbia too.
Stache99
@Stache99: When I said it I meant cult.
Paul Nadolski
As Gandhi so eloquently put it, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
frubino
Shame religion, all religions who doggedly pushing people regarding fornication, I feel sorry for you, and I feel sorry for you that you were born so stupid as people do not know what thinking. You do not know what it really means fornication. Fornication is true for heterosexuals and fools.
SteveDenver
As I heard one friend say to another when she freaked out that her son was gay: “You can either have a gay son or a dead son. Make your choice carefully, because your son loves you too much to cause you grief.”
Luckily she chose to have a live, beautiful, smart, kind, tenderhearted gay son; and it has made her a better woman standing up for WHO HER SON IS, instead of dwelling on some unfulfilled fantasy.
All religion is BAD. Sure people do some nice things in the name of religion, but it doesn’t begin to balance the evil horrors brought about in the name of religious superstition and manipulation.
dknog
Sadly catholic schools in Colombia still think that they are bigger than the law, because even thought in 2012 a law that say that educational insitutions, public or private, can’t discrimiate against sexuality, gender, religion, there are still many schools that ‘criminalize’ with expulsion homosexuality, teen pregnancy, alcoholism and drug addiction.
Colombia is everyday more tolerant but there is still some part of the society (upper class, extreme right wing, old school catholic) that keeps the country on the 18th century.
Chris
@SteveDenver: Your friend is very wise. Unfortunately, I must wonder how many people would chose the dead son.
jkb
How do these people live with themselves?
hephaestion
And all those people in charge of that Catholic school are closet cases, you can be sure.
markmarkmarkmark
Yes – it’s terrible. I read that 5-Jewish hasidicrabbinical students gay bashed a GAY African American Man. It’s despicable the homophobia in the religious sect. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/04/hasidic-jews-arrested-for-williamsburg-attack.html
markmarkmarkmark
@hephaestion: I think these 5 JewishGuys were probably gay too http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/04/hasidic-jews-arrested-for-williamsburg-attack.html
Billy Budd
Religion is poison. I will repeat this forever and ever.
DickieJohnson
I do hope that legal action can/will be taken because this was illegal according to the Colombian antidiscrimination law. Perhaps it can set a precedent for future cases. Someone needs to pay for this boy’s awful suicide.
DickieJohnson
@Chris: Call someone from Brunei.
StephK
I am not going to bad mouth religion nor the Catholic Church here..others have done it repeatedly and with glee. That having been said, I nevertheless must agree how terribly wrong and sad it is that religious zealotry and cultural homophobia have once again led to the loss of a precious and self-accepting gay youth . I hope that this tragedy has as much of an impact on Colombia and Latin America as the Tyler Clementi case did here. Certainly the school officials should be prosecuted and punished not only with jail time, but also with personal and professional legacies that will haunt and shame them the rest of their living days.
Black Swan
Guns don’t kill people. People kill people. Religion isn’t the problem stupid people. Religion is the cover. People still are the problem cowards. You don’t understand yet that it’s the people who are using religion as a cover for the evil that lies within their own souls that are the problem? So then religion becomes your excuse, because you’re too weak of a person to point your finger at the people themselves who are the real problem, and hold them directly accountable. How stupid. You get rid of religion, and it will be something else the next day just as benign that becomes their new cover, and your new excuse. Religion is faith. Some of you guys need religion, and there are gay, and gay friendly churches out there to help you with that, so you can stop being so nihilistic on my watch already. Hating religion is far from any gay agenda. That would be throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Leonard Woodrow
Christianity hang your head in shame.
Billy Budd
Of course religion is a problem. If religious leaders did not disseminate and teach little children how to have prejudice, be afraid of gays and be bigots, the world would be a better place. Religion is not only faith, but ideology. Ideas. Culture. Little children are BUILDING their minds. Whatever is taught TENDS TO REMAIN. There are many studies proving this. Religious education for kids is the worst disaster that can happen. The biases, fear and bigotry will stay with the kids forever until they die.
Billy Budd
Bertrand Russell, Novel Prize winner, “Why I’m not a christian”, 1927:
“It would seem, therefore, that the three human impulses embodied in religion are fear, conceit, and hatred. The purpose of religion, one may say, is to give an air of respectability to these passions, provided they run in certain channels. It is because these passions make, on the whole, for human misery that religion is a force for evil, since it permits men to indulge these passions without restraint, where but for its sanction they might, at least to a certain degree, control them.”
“Sex cannot dispense with an ethic, any more than business or sport or scientific research or any other branch of human activity. But it can dispense with an ethic based solely upon ancient prohibitions propounded by uneducated people in a society wholly unlike our own. In sex as in economics and politics, our ethic is still dominated by fears which modern discoveries have made irrational…There has to be consistency in life; there has to be continuous effort directed to ends that are not immediately beneficial and not at every moment attractive; there has to be consideration for others; and there should be certain standards of rectitude”.
michael mellor
It’s time to shut down this Catholic school and file criminal charges.
cvdixon29
See! More people dragging the bible and God into this, They justify this by that??? Sick and twisted….SMH
frankbos
What those who bullied this beautiful boy do not understand is that he to was created in god’s image. I have no doubt that Sergio is with the angels now.
If his death just causes one person or thanks to Queerty thousands to think about bullying of LGBT by “religous” people, it may ultimalty serve to change those religions.
Tommysole
Do not try to blame Floyd.
Ogre Magi
Yet another gay teen suffering because of christianity. THANKS A LOT JESUS!!!!
Tom Pinion
@Black Swan: You are right on so many levels, but you must also consider that more often than not religion teaches discrimination and hatred towards Gay people and those who take it to heart then use such religion to justify their actions.