I interviewed a mother and teenage son last summer shortly after he was discharged from the hospital for cutting himself and for trying to kill himself. Very similar story to yours. He realized he was gay and suddenly all the support and love in his life, which had always been centered around his family's Southern Baptist church, disappeared. And that might be a mild way of putting it. A more accurate way might be to say that the support changed into open hostility.

His mother struggled for months. She tried to send him to pastoral counseling to make him straight or to get him to renounce his identity. Finally, after his second suicide attempt, she grasped that what she was doing was unloving. She changed her mind and fully accepted her son as gay, as just fine the way he is.

Her church congregation and the conservative local community rejected her for that. She had been working as the church secretary, and the pastor fired her. Friends all over town dropped her.

Several months later, feeling like pariahs, the family moved hundreds of miles away to get a fresh start.

This is not an unusual tale. It's hard to understand religions to treat people the way that Southern Baptist congregation treated that family. It's hard to understand religions that practically define themselves by whom they reject.