The church must admit its complicity in bullying — and stop it.

When I was pastor of a rural Virginia church in the early 1990s, I performed the funeral of a young gay man, a member of the church, who’d died from hepatitis contracted from needle exchange. If that hadn’t killed him, though, AIDS would have. It wasn’t suicide, but it might as well have been, because his self-destructive path had started with being bullied, teased and demeaned as a teenager — at that very church.