For us LGBTQ people, the sort of public disapproval of our lives, to the point where even strangers feel free to criticize us, isn’t just toxic – it leads to really terrible things.

I just published a story a few days ago about a 12-year-old boy in rural Tennessee who came out to his classmates as gay. They bullied him so relentlessly in explicitly Evangelical Christian terms that he took his own life last week.

The kids at his school took it upon themselves to tell him he was a sinner bound for hell. They were sending the same message as this woman was trying to send in that food court.

I wrote a story about Eli’s death, centering around the fact that the kids in his school were emulating the respected adults in their lives. Preparing to write, I found article after article about how adults in that part of Tennessee behaved like that woman in the food court, and worse.

The adults in the Tennessee legislature even canceled plans to give an award to a country music star this summer after he came out as gay. Newspapers in the boy’s county were full of stories about how the star is immoral and offends Christianity.

I could go on, but the boy’s world was filled with condemnation like that. His classmates followed the examples of all the adults in their lives who constantly condemn LGBTQ people.

Because of people like that woman in the food court who believe their private religious beliefs are worth forcing on other people, a 12-year-old is now dead.

I like to think the boy’s community is going to take a lesson from this, but public statements are already showing that they’re not learning anything. Yes, of course everyone is devastated the boy committed suicide, but officials are making noises about how to improve mental health resources at the schools and pump up resiliency programs and so forth. As if it were the boy’s fault that his classmates taunted him for being gay on Evangelical Christian grounds. As if more tragic outcomes aren’t going to happen again, inevitably, unless people stop thinking they have the right to morally condemn others based on their private religious beliefs.