An It Gets Better video dedicated to
the memory of Jamie Hubley is being criticized for being too
impersonal.
Hubley is the 15-year-old openly gay
Ottawa, Canada teenager who committed suicide last weekend. He wrote
in a blog post before his death that he had been driven to kill
himself by the constant harassment of schoolyard bullies.
A group of Conservative MPs on Thursday
– the same day Hubley was laid to rest – released an It Gets
Better video to remind gay youth that life gets better.
“[W]e wanted to share that it gets
better message with you, especially in memory of Jamie,” the video
begins. (The video is embedded in the right panel of this page.)
The video features several MPs,
including Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird and Public Safety
Minister Vic Toews, repeating the line “it gets better.”
But the video has been panned as too
impersonal.
“It would have need nice for them to
personalize it and make it meaningful,” Wendy Craig, a Queen's
University psychology professor, told The
Gazette.
“I would have loved to hear personal
anecdotes or stories, and more solutions of what we can do,” she
added.
Dan Savage, the Seattle-based activist
who founded the It
Gets Better Project, was also not impressed.
“I'll just say this about Canada's
Conservatives' contribution to the It Gets Better Project: People who
are in a position to make it better – elected officials – but who
have chosen, over the years, to make it worse, can come around. But
it's going to take more than a video to undo the damage done by Vic
Toews and Canada's conservatives. This was, quite literally, the
least Vic and his fellow conservatives could do. The very least.”
Commenters on Savage's blog had noted
that several of the participants in the video, including Toews, had
voted against the legalization of gay marriage.
(Related: Ellen
DeGeneres, Anderson Cooper to blame for Jamie Hubley's death,
minister claims.)