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Daily Mail attack piece leads to suicide of transgender teacher
Topic Started: Mar 22 2013, 11:27 PM (686 Views)
Riverwide
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The Daily Mail: Fire Richard Littlejohn

This week, after being mocked in the press with an attack piece by the Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn, schoolteacher Lucy Meadows committed suicide.

Lucy was raised male, but recently underwent a transition to live as female -- which for Littlejohn was reason enough to attack her in his column. Leading with the mocking headline "He's not only in the wrong body... he's in the wrong job", Littlejohn belittled and harassed Meadows, referring to her decision as her “personal problems” and playing on the outdated scare tactic that LGBT people are a threat to children.

The vile article led to a witch hunt targeting Meadows. Newspapers offered to pay parents for a picture of her, and she complained of having to leave home by the back door and arrive early to school to avoid the packs of journalists.

Sign our petition to the Daily Mail: fire Richard Littlejohn, issue an apology, and institute an editorial review to ensure that this never happens again.

Richard Littlejohn has a long history of using his perch at the the Daily Mail to mock and harass others, from laughing at cerebral palsy to snide insinuation that ethnic minorities got their jobs through discrimination to incessant attacks on the LGBT community, Littlejohn has been a national disgrace.

Throughout the article, Littlejohn repeatedly referred to Lucy as “he”, and claimed that getting gender reassignment surgery showed that she didn't care for the children she taught.

Littlejohn claimed that children don’t have the capacity to handle a gender transition -- but kids are smart and don’t carry the bias that adults have absorbed over the years. Just take the experience our campaign manager Kaytee's partner Max had when he came out to his little cousin as a transgender man. The cousin said “Oh, that makes sense. I always thought you were a boy. Now can we go play Legos?” Gender transition is only an issue for kids when the adults in their lives -- many egged on by these sorts of offensive opinion pieces -- make it out to be a problem.

The Daily Mail may thrive on controversy to sell its tabloid papers, but even it knows it went too far this time. In the wake of backlash, the Daily Mail removed the article from its website, but the damage has already been done.

Everyone has the right to say what they think, but mainstream publications like the Daily Mail shouldn't support and promote this sort of hate. The Daily Mail needs to ensure that this never happens again -- by not only yanking Littlejohn’s column and apologizing for the paper’s decision to run the hateful opinion piece, but also instituting an editorial review policy that prevents discriminatory writing from ending up in its paper again.

Tell the Daily Mail that newspaper columns cannot be used for bullying and hate, and that Richard Littlejohn has no place in the papers.

http://action.sumofus.org/a/daily-mail-littlejohn-lucy-meadows/?sub=tw
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thesmu
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So disgusting
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how does shit like this even still get printed? :(
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Riverwide
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I have NO idea. It doesn't seem right at all.
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thesmu
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So disgusting
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made my blood boil :(
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FuckBuddy
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such a horrible story. i've never got why british people, who are mostly liberal and self conscious, feel the need to let this lame excuse of a newspaper keep going. even the sun is equivalent to the guardian when compared to daily mail.
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Beautiful Stranger
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Haven't even American citizens won defamation/libel lawsuits against the Daily Mail? They're a joke.
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Jimmy Mack
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The most depressing elements about The Daily Mail are the comments left on the articles, and the number of likes some of the most hateful and spiteful shit gets.

Truly the stuff of nightmares.
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TickTock
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I Fckt Riverwide N Da Azz Real Hard Again
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Beautiful Stranger
Mar 24 2013, 04:47 AM
Haven't even American citizens won defamation/libel lawsuits against the Daily Mail? They're a joke.
American celebs?
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SrkiSrle
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Roi D'Illusion
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Can't believe he hasn't been fired yet
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Riverwide
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The Daily Mail's response:

“It is regrettable that this tragic death should now be the subject of an orchestrated [attack on us], fanned by individuals… with agendas to pursue.”

:megamanson:
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Beautiful Stranger
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Cue the violins.
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johnnox
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I doubt anything will happen as a result of this or the petition.

Look what happened after the opinion piece on Stephen Gately.... nothing.
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johnnox
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Daily Mail - 2009....

The news of Stephen Gately's death was deeply shocking. It was not just that another young star had died pointlessly.
Through the recent travails and sad ends of Michael Jackson, Heath Ledger and many others, fans know to expect the unexpected of their heroes - particularly if those idols live a life that is shadowed by dark appetites or fractured by private vice.

There are dozens of household names out there with secret and not-so-secret troubles, or damaging habits both past and present.
Robbie, Amy, Kate, Whitney, Britney; we all know who they are. And we are not being ghoulish to anticipate, or to be mentally braced for, their bad end: a long night, a mysterious stranger, an odd set of circumstances that herald a sudden death.

In the morning, a body has already turned cold before the first concerned hand reaches out to touch an icy celebrity shoulder. It is not exactly a new storyline, is it?
In fact, it is rather depressingly familiar. But somehow we never expected it of him. Never him. Not Stephen Gately.
In the cheerful environs of Boyzone, Gately was always charming, cute, polite and funny.
A founder member of Ireland's first boy band, he was the group's co-lead singer, even though he could barely carry a tune in a Louis Vuitton trunk.
He was the Posh Spice of Boyzone, a popular but largely decorous addition.
Gately came out as gay in 1999 after discovering that someone was planning to sell a story revealing his sexuality to a newspaper.
Although he was effectively smoked out of the closet, he has been hailed as a champion of gay rights, albeit a reluctant one.
At the time, Gately worried that the revelations might end his ultra-mainstream career as a pin-up, but he received an overwhelmingly positive response from fans. In fact, it only made them love him more.
In 2006, Gately entered into a civil union with internet businessman Andrew Cowles, who had been introduced to him by mutual friends Elton John and David Furnish.
Last week, the couple were enjoying a holiday together in their apartment in Mallorca before their world was capsized.

All the official reports point to a natural death, with no suspicious circumstances. The Gately family are - perhaps understandably - keen to register their boy's demise on the national consciousness as nothing more than a tragic accident.
Even before the post-mortem and toxicology reports were released by the Spanish authorities, the Gatelys' lawyer reiterated that they believed his sudden death was due to natural causes.
But, hang on a minute. Something is terribly wrong with the way this incident has been shaped and spun into nothing more than an unfortunate mishap on a holiday weekend, like a broken teacup in the rented cottage.
Consider the way it has been largely reported, as if Gately had gently keeled over at the age of 90 in the grounds of the Bide-a-Wee rest home while hoeing the sweet pea patch.
The sugar coating on this fatality is so saccharine-thick that it obscures whatever bitter truth lies beneath. Healthy and fit 33-year-old men do not just climb into their pyjamas and go to sleep on the sofa, never to wake up again.


Whatever the cause of death is, it is not, by any yardstick, a natural one. Let us be absolutely clear about this. All that has been established so far is that Stephen Gately was not murdered.
And I think if we are going to be honest, we would have to admit that the circumstances surrounding his death are more than a little sleazy.
After a night of clubbing, Cowles and Gately took a young Bulgarian man back to their apartment. It is not disrespectful to assume that a game of canasta with 25-year-old Georgi Dochev was not what was on the cards.
Cowles and Dochev went to the bedroom together while Stephen remained alone in the living room.

What happened before they parted is known only to the two men still alive. What happened afterwards is anyone's guess.
A post-mortem revealed Stephen died from acute pulmonary oedema, a build-up of fluid on his lungs.
Gately's family have always maintained that drugs were not involved in the singer's death, but it has just been revealed that he at least smoked cannabis on the night he died.
Nevertheless, his mother is still insisting that her son died from a previously undetected heart condition that has plagued the family.

Another real sadness about Gately's death is that it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships.
Gay activists are always calling for tolerance and understanding about same-sex relationships, arguing that they are just the same as heterosexual marriages. Not everyone, they say, is like George Michael.
Of course, in many cases this may be true. Yet the recent death of Kevin McGee, the former husband of Little Britain star Matt Lucas, and now the dubious events of Gately's last night raise troubling questions about what happened.
It is important that the truth comes out about the exact circumstances of his strange and lonely death.
As a gay rights champion, I am sure he would want to set an example to any impressionable young men who may want to emulate what they might see as his glamorous routine.

For once again, under the carapace of glittering, hedonistic celebrity, the ooze of a very different and more dangerous lifestyle has seeped out for all to see.

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Riverwide
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Beyond wretched. Utterly, utterly sick.
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