A question for Pastor Rick Warren about his son's suicide.

So one question to you, Pastor Rick Warren. Let's presume that your son was really and truly straight and just struggled with depression because of a bona-fide medical condition that your current doctor could not treat. Now presume that a very good friend comes up to you and says, "Take your son to another doctor." So you do, and the new doctor says, "The only problem with your son is that the church he goes to is making him sick." If this would have happened, would you have started going to another church to save your son's life?

Pastor Warren, your son might have been chemically depressed in a way that medication could not rebalance it, but the "depressed" gay teens who commit suicide at between four- to eight-times the national average for straight kids (depending on where they live) are only depressed because of "doctors" like you who claim this "privilege" to diagnose a condition of birth as a "mental illness," akin to what your son struggled with.

Your son's suicide might very well be karma coming back to you because you have, over the years, felt that it was your "calling" to tell a gay teen's parents that he/she was "mentally ill" with this "temporary" and "curable" condition called homosexuality that could be "cured" with enough prayer and fasting (and, BTW...pass the collection plate please).

So, your "prescription" of prayer and fasting falls flat, just like your doctor's prescriptions could not fix Matthew, and the gay teenaged child of your parishioners continues to be depressed. This article shows that this "mentally ill" (i.e. gay) child that you prescribe "fasting and prayer" for is 3-times more likely to think about suicide now, and 4-times more likely to attempt suicide in a way that requires hospitalization than the "regular" kid who thinks about suicide. That equates to 12-times more likely that a gay teen from your congregation will end up needing medical treatment for a suicide attempt than a straight kid from your congregation.

And you willingly put parents of gay teens into this kind of a risky position that you had to live with for 27 years with Matthew? Are you for real? Why do you do that? Knowing what you know now, would you have done it to Matthew if you knew you could have done something to completely eliminate that risk of suicide?

Why don't you do the right thing for Matthew now, and the next time you find out that a kid from your congregation (or any homophobic congregation, for that matter, especially the Mormons) is struggling with his/her sexual or gender identity, why don't you tell those parents to take their child OUT of your congregation into an affirming environment so that those parents will NEVER have to deal with the pain that you now deal with.

May this be your wake-up call. Stop the quackery and make sure parents of gay kids do not scapegoat "mental illness" for the depression that their kids struggle with. In Christian families that hate on gays, the only condition that family suffers from is the parent's addiction to fundamentalist religions like the one you preach, and it is 100% curable by just changing where they attend church. From one Sunday to the next they can make the problem go away.