Tyler Clementi felt he had been rejected by his evangelical Christian parents

[pnwmom]

shortly before the computer cam spying that preceded his suicide -- this, according to an interview with this parents.

I'm guessing this is why his roommate wasn't charged with contributing to his death; all of this information (along with the letter he was said to have written to his parents) would necessarily have been part of the trial.

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2012/06/tyler_clementis_mother_blames.html

Jane Clementi, along with her husband, Joseph, talked about the struggle they had reconciling their evangelical Christian beliefs with their son’s revelation he was gay. Tyler was shaking and crying when he told his mother about his sexual orientation shortly before leaving home for Rutgers in September of 2010, she said.

Her religious beliefs may have contributed to Tyler’s perception that he’d been "basically completely rejected" by his mother, as he later Tweeted to a friend.

Learning of that comment after her son’s suicide "was like a dagger," she said. "And that took a long time to process, because I did not think I had rejected him."

SNIP

Both parents have come to believe sexual orientation shouldn’t be a religious issue. "Sin needs to be taken out of homosexuality," Joseph Clementi said. "Our children need to understand — and adults need to understand — they’re not broken. And once they understand that, the church can move forward."

SNIP

___________________

Edit to add:

I just heard on TV that, after Tyler's death, another of the Clementi sons came out to his parents. The parents have made a 180 degree turn on their views, believing that a child's homosexuality should not be merely "accepted" but "embraced."

They've begun a foundation in Tyler's memory to help gay teens.

[markpkessinger]

1. This is exactly why I didn't have a problem with Dharun Ravi's sentence . . .

I am a gay man and have experienced bias intimidation in my time (and even one outright gay bashing). So I am sensitive to the issue. But after I read Ryan Lizza's New Yorker article, it became clear to me the media had seriously overblown the connection with the webcam spying incident (which, frankly, while it concerned Tyler, did not appear, of itself, to have rendered him distraught). If the webcam incident truly was the thing which finally drove Tyler to suicide,l then I would suggest he was already very, very psychologically fragile. People wanted to turn the trial into a de facto murder trial; but there would have been no justice in holding Ravi responsible for Tyler's extremely fragile state. What Ravi did was wrong, but it was appropriate to punish for the wrong he actually committed -- and the intent behind it, and not for the tragedy of Tyler's suicide, which may or may not have had much of anything to do with Ravi's action. And whether the two were related in any way, it is almost certainly the case that there were many other factors as well that contributed to the kind of desperation Tyler felt.

[pnwmom]

2. Yes, I believe it was, at most, the straw that broke the camel's back.

And I'm afraid the parents and their religion might have piled on some lead bricks.

Did you see the part at the end? That one of their other sons has finally been able to acknowledge his own orientation? I'm so sorry for what this family has gone through, and I hope their reconciliation with this son and their work with the foundation will help them heal.