The tragedy of the catalysts likely to greatly drive the LGBT Civil Rights struggle forward, akin to the revulsion that all decent people felt during the African American Civil Rights struggle when Bull Connor turned the police dogs and the fire hoses on the demonstrators for the whole world to see, is the publicity surrounding the suicides of Gay teenagers such as these whose pain, caused by others' homophobia, was so great that they were driven to suicide. [See here and here.]
It won't be politicians, clergy, or the general public that will enable full and equal civil rights! Those rights will eventually come from the Courts!
However, jurists, like most people, have their decisions shaped by their own life experiences, by their interpretation of the Constitution, and by the social and historical climates in which they live. And the public tragedies of suicides such as these can not help but call immediate attention to the tremendous damage that homophobia visits on LGBT youth (and adults), and the cry for full and equal rights in every aspect of society.
Only indecent people, those consumed with hate and/or the politics of exclusion, can fail to not only be moved by these suicides, but fail to demand in any and every venue possible the correct interpretation of the U.S. Constitution that "separate is not equal," and that all citizens of the U.S. are to be treated equally under the law.
It is tragedies such as these suicides that, unlike so many other suicides by LGBT people that are treated with silence, gain tremendous publicity to the degree that they literally shock the public conscience; it is that shock to all decent people's sensibilities that will do more to gain equal rights than anything else that I can think of at this time.
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