Anti-gay activist Robert Oscar Lopez offers up a shocking motive for Tyler Clementi's 2010 suicide in a bizarre American Thinker editorial.
Lopez, whose stance on the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community is well established, suggests that the 18-year-old Clementi may have been prompted to commit suicide after having been a victim of statutory rape:
"Clementi had a sexual affair with 'M.B.,' a man who was thirty, whom he met over the internet. His 18-year-old roommate video-recorded the tryst with a webcam and then posted it online. The resulting outrage led to the 'It Gets Better' campaign and the Tyler Clementi Act."
Noting that Clementi "viewed it as banal to meet much older men on the Internet," Lopez continues:
"Clementi had so much experience with online hookups that he must have started them prior to turning eighteen. When he was a minor, it's probable that he had liaisons with men who were older than eighteen and committing statutory rape. Seen through this lens, society failed not in fostering homophobia, but rather in allowing a culture of abuse to flourish online."
You can read Lopez's full column here.
Previously, Lopez has equated same-sex parents to "slavers buying children," and has spoken out against same-sex marriage despite having been raised by lesbian moms.
"I have no mental health disorders or biological conditions," he wrote in regard to his upbringing. "I just grew up in a house so unusual that I was destined to exist as a social outcast ... Gay people who grew up in straight parents’ households may have struggled with their sexual orientation; but when it came to the vast social universe of adaptations not dealing with sexuality—how to act, how to speak, how to behave—they had the advantage of learning at home."
Before You Go
