upworthy

hate speech

via Mick Haupt/Unsplash
A child looks really upset on a playground.

Robbie Pierce, his husband, Neal Broverman are no strangers to bigotry. The men and their two young children were traveling on an Amtrak train in California in 2022 when they were harassed by a fellow passenger at a stop in San Jose; an incident that made headlines.

"All of a sudden, there was a man standing there next to me," Pierce told The Advocate. The man told their son, "Remember what I told you earlier. They stole you and they're pedophiles," Pierce recounts. The man also said that gay people are abominations. (Broverman is the editorial director for print media at Pride, The Advocate's parent company.)

The police were called and the man was thrown off the train, but the incident was a frightening reminder that gay families could be the target of bigots any time and anywhere, even in liberal Northern California. "It's a new level of homophobia out there," Pierce added.

Seven months later, Pierce’s son was the victim of harassment, this time from a child at a park.


lgbtq families, religious trauma, indoctrination, gay, lgbtq, bullying, hate, advocacy, parenting, lgbtq parentingA day at the park turned hateful and confrontation for Roobie Pierce and his son.Dakota Lim/Unsplash

"A random unattended 7-year-old at the park told me and my son that gay people are the devil,” he recounted in a viral X thread. "My son scoffed, but the boy said it was true because God said so."

Maybe it was the incident months prior. Maybe it was a lifetime of harassment and judgment. But whatever it was, in that moment, Pierce had had enough. He reacted to the boy’s hatred — which he probably learned at home — with his own lesson.

“I told him parents made up God to make their Kids do what they want. His eyes got so big,” he wrote on X.

It's worth wondering: Did God really 'say so'? Biblical scholars are split on the Bible's true message around homosexuality. It appears open to interpretation, and it's clear that many people choose to interpret the words in a hateful and negative way, going so far as to show their children that it's OK to approach and confront gay people over their identities.

Addressing complex issues like religion and sexuality with a young child, who’s a stranger, is a tricky needle to thread, so Pierce admits he had some reservations about his response. But he stands by his decision.

“I'm sorry but if you teach your kids to hate I'm going to teach them to disobey you," he wrote on X.

As someone who has been harassed by religious, homophobic people in the past, Pierce took the opportunity to help steer a young child away from hatred. At the age of 7, most children believe whatever their parents tell them. However, Pierce planted a seed in the child’s mind that may one day encourage him to challenge his indoctrination when he gets older. The kid will likely remember that interaction for many years to come, and may look back at it with shame one day. That shame could be the much-needed catalyst for change.

"I was shocked at first and then...well...you may have planted a seed to grow a fine human out of the little homophobic bigot he was being trained up as. I can't argue with that," one user wrote on X.

The vast majority of commenters on X agreed with Pierce’s response to the child’s comment.

However, some people thought Pierce’s response to the child was inappropriate.

Bigoted words or not, it was still a child, and many people thought there may have been a more tactful way to teach the kid a lesson rather than invalidating his entire faith. Or perhaps Pierce could have tracked down the boy's parents and given them an earful instead.

One thing is clear: Something in our culture is definitely broken when we're more intent on policing people's responses to bigotry and hate versus addressing the root cause of these divides. The boy's parents should be the one on trial in the court of public opinion for teaching their son that this kind of behavior is acceptable.

No matter how one feels about Pierce’s reaction, what’s clear is that there is something very inappropriate about a 7-year-old child openly harassing LGBTQ families. The unfortunate problem is that this type of hyper-religious upbringing can cause lasting emotional and psychological trauma to a child. And it’s a common problem. A recent study in the growing field of religious trauma found that 1 in 3 Americans suffer from trauma related to religion at some point in their life.

While we might be quick to dismiss the child’s behavior as innocent or simply as a symptom of growing up in a religious household, the more we learn about religious trauma, the more these children appear to be the victims of abuse. Hopefully Pierce's words will help the boy rethink his relationship with his faith, and his parents, down the road.

This article originally appeared last year. It has been updated.

The Samel family immigrated to the U.S. from Sudan in 2010. They became naturalized citizens in May 2015 and moved into a new house in Iowa City, Iowa, that December.

The house had actually been built for them with help from Habitat for Humanity and as part of the city's National Day of Service and Remembrance in honor of 9/11. The Muslim family — Amar Samel and his wife, Muna Abdalla, along with their four children — were happily settling into their new American lives, including jobs and schooling.

They'd been living in the house 11 months when Amar Samel returned home from a memorial service to find a less-than-welcoming note on the door:

“You can all go home now. We don’t want (a racial epithet) and terrorists here. #Trump.”

Photo via Stephen Mally/The (Cedar Rapids, Iowa) Gazette, used with permission.


That was Nov. 11, 2016, the Friday after Election Day. Judging by the hashtag stamped on the end of the hateful message, the timing was no coincidence.

Unfortunately, when Samel called the police, they were not particularly helpful at first. According to Samel, the officer he spoke with on the phone declined to visit the house or take a formal statement and told Samel to simply take the note down and throw it away.

"This disappointed me more than the action itself because I was looking for kind of support," Samel told the Iowa City Press-Citizen. "Because the police obviously represent for us, represent somebody supporting you. The law. The power. So nobody’s above the law."

The police administration has since assigned a detective to investigate the case. The Iowa City Area CrimeStoppers also stepped in to offer a $1,000 reward for information about the culprits behind the note.

Photo via Stephen Mally/The (Cedar Rapids, Iowa) Gazette, used with permission.

But as word of the incident began to spread around Iowa City, the Samels' fellow Iowans found other ways to show their support.

Strangers and friends alike banded together to flood the family with neighborly love and true hospitality, sending them cookies, cards, flowers, and balloons and chalking affectionate messages on their driveway.

"I'm glad your [sic] my brother's best friend," wrote one classmate to the Samels' son, Mohammed.

"You are very nice people. You should stay," someone scribbled on the asphalt outside their home. "We're glad you're here!" another wrote.

Photo via Stephen Mally/The (Cedar Rapids, Iowa) Gazette, used with permission.

"You hear about these things happening, but you don’t really know if it’s true. When I heard people say this was their neighbor, it really hit home," one Iowan told The Gazette after dropping off a flower bouquet at the Samel family home the Monday after the incident.

Photo via Stephen Mally/The (Cedar Rapids, Iowa) Gazette, used with permission.

Sarah Widdick Shaw saw the Samels' heartbreaking story in The Gazette and shared it with the famous secret Facebook group Pantsuit Nation.

Shaw urged her fellow group members to keep the lovefest going for the Samel family by sending them even more notes, cards, and gifts through The Gazette, whose address she included in the post.

"I only hope that there were enough to make a difference for them," she said. "It's not much, sending letters of support, but gezzus we have to do something to counteract all this hate."

Within the hour, the post had been shared by more than a hundred people. Other users shared photos of their cards, letters, baked goods, and handmade gifts such as stickers and temporary tattoos. Some people even made donations to Habitat for Humanity because they'd helped to build the family's home.

Photo via Stephen Mally/The (Cedar Rapids, Iowa) Gazette, used with permission.

By the Monday before Thanksgiving, The Gazette had received more than a hundred cards and letters, all looking to be delivered to the Samels.

The family was overwhelmed by the support. When The Gazette asked if the family wanted to respond to this outpouring of support, Amar Samel answered, "Tell them we are OK. Everything will be OK. We are relieved by knowing that, this is life, always there is good and bad, but the good is always more."

Just a few of the cards received at the Gazette office. Image via the Samel family.

Recent events may have invigorated a new surge of hate in America, but it's inspired even more people to show how big their hearts can be.

"Hopefully the next generation will have more warmth in their hearts," Sarah Widdick Shaw said after seeing the response to her Facebook post. Though maybe that warmth is already there. We just need to make sure we're actively, openly sharing it for all the world to feel and see.

"We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we've sucked at it for years," said former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo in a leaked 2015 memo.

"It's no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day," he continued. "We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day."

It was a surprising admission about one of the service's biggest flaws. On Twitter, sharing other users' posts as easy as a single touch, but that also creates the opportunity for regular people going about their day on Twitter to wind up the target of harassment from thousands of other users at a moment's notice.


Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images.

Since the memo leaked, Twitter has been trying to solve some of the more obvious problems by adding a quality filter meant to weed out threatening messages from spam accounts and creating a path to account verification. Still, these steps weren't enough, and the torrent of abuse its users experience was hurting the company financially.

This week, Twitter announced a number of new tools meant to address the abuse problem, and they look like they might be pretty helpful.

(Trigger warning: Hate speech and transphobic slurs follow below.)

For one, they're expanding the mute feature so users can opt out of conversations and notifications including certain words. This is a big step forward since one of the bigger problems targets of harassment deal with is the aftermath of a tweet that's getting too much attention from the wrong crowd.

More importantly, Twitter is clarifying its terms of service, making it easier for users to file a report, and providing training to support staff to ensure they're up to date on the latest policies. The hateful conduct policy bans abusive behavior targeting people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease.

What does online harassment look like, anyway? Here's some of what I get sent my way on a regular basis:

It's not especially fun, but while hurtful, it's usually not too bad.

Other times, though, the messages contain violent threats. For example (and this gets a little graphic):

The problem is that in many of these cases, there hasn't been anything a user could do to prevent these messages from coming.

You can block a single user, but once they've shared your tweet with everyone who follows them, chances are their followers will come after you. It's an infinite loop of blocking people. You can also report violent threats as abusive, but once Twitter goes through the process of reviewing the report, they often reply with a simple note saying that the tweets reported didn't violate their terms of service.

This is by no means limited to Twitter. Facebook has a similar problem with its reporting process, coming off as ineffective and sometimes arbitrary.

It's all somewhat understandable. As businesses, Facebook and Twitter have to find a balance between protecting free and open speech and shielding users from harm. Within hours of the announcement of new anti-harassment tools, Twitter suspended a number of high-profile accounts known for engaging in targeted harassment — that's certainly a start.

With new technology changing our world all the time, it's important that we remember to treat one another as human beings. Anti-bullying efforts will play a crucial role in years to come.

Whether it's on Twitter, Facebook, or in virtual reality spaces, online privacy and harassment protection plays an important role in society. It's easy to forget that there is a real human being on the other end of these online conversations. It's easy to treat them as undeserving of respect. It's easy to lose empathy for the world.

It's harder to do the right thing, but that doesn't change that it is, in fact, the right thing.

More

In spite of himself, Trump is motivating the group he seems to hate the most.

New data suggest that Trump's rise is driving more immigrants than ever before to become U.S. citizens.

Thanks to a decisive victory in the Indiana primary and the suspension of Ted Cruz's campaign, Donald Trump is pretty likely to secure the Republican nomination for president of the United States.

The online reaction thus far has been... Let's call it "disappointed."



Trump has been spewing hateful rhetoric since the day he announced his campaign.

He's referred to immigrants as "rapists," "criminals," and "killers." He regularly responds to female opposition with sexist, misogynistic attacks. He not only witnessed the unjustifiable violence that punctuated many of his rallies, but he encouraged it.


He's also talked about his hands. Like ... a lot.

But believe it or not, Trump's hate speech has inspired some really positive movement from the group he appears to despise most: immigrants.

Similar to how gun-owners often stockpile weapons and ammunition following a gun-related tragedy — because they're worried gun safety legislation will make guns and ammo harder to buy — Trump's political ascension and his promise to enlist a "deportation force" to exile some 11 million undocumented immigrants has led to an unlikely but significant increase in the number of immigrants applying for citizenship here in the United States.

A May 1, 2016, May Day march. Photo by David McNew/Getty Images

According to the The New York Times, naturalization applications spiked by 14% in the last half of 2015 compared to the same period in 2014. And they're on pace to break records for 2016 as well.

One immigrant, Edgar Ospina, told the Associated Press that the anti-immigrant sentiment being stirred up by Trump's rise was the driving force behind his decision to apply for naturalization.

An owner of a small flooring and kitchen remodeling company, Ospina emigrated from Columbia over 20 years ago and became eligible for citizenship in 1990, but he has only recently decided there is no time left to waste.

A large group waits to take the citizenship oath that will allow them to become U.S. citizens in 2015. Photo by Saul Loeb, AFP, Getty Images.

"Trump is dividing us as a country," Ospina told. "He's so negative about immigrants. We've got to speak up."

Luis Gutiérrez, a 10-term U.S. Representative from Illinois, also took to the public airwaves to encourage immigrants to apply for citizenship so they can vote in November.

"We want to raise our voices because the city of Chicago has an incredibly proud tradition of being inclusive, of bringing people together," Gutierrez said during a protest last month. "And Mr. Trump has the tradition of division, of hatred, of bigotry, of prejudice. We are asking all of Chicago to stand up."

Another unforeseen silver lining to Trump's campaign of hate? The reimagining of the Republican party.

Trump might be the Republican party's nominee for this year's political race, but he couldn't be further from what many members of the party consider to be the true embodiment of Republican ideals.

Image via Saul Loeb, AFP, Getty Images.

He waffles often on his stances, appearing to support gay marriage, calling out North Carolina's ridiculous HB2 bill, and supporting both universal health care and higher taxes for the wealthy. In fact, he's even gone on record in the past as saying, "In many cases, I probably identify more as a Democrat.”

As a result, more and more Americans are being forced to rethink what the Republican party means to them, and some people are even deregistering from the party.


Trump has been such a divisive figure among Republicans that he even led to the dissolution of the Friends of Abe, a "secret society" of conservative Hollywood elites.

All of this just goes to show that hate can still inspire good, even when that hate comes from the darkest of sources.

Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images