A few months ago, my oldest son, Charlie, came out to me as a homosexual.

He sat his mother and I down in the living room and confessed everything to us; about how he had always felt attraction towards men, for his entire life. He even told us that he had a boyfriend who he wanted to introduce us to. Justine and I had always had our suspicions about Charlie, but we were still shocked by our son’s revelation.

Suffice to say, Charlie is no longer a son of mine.

You see, every now and again, teenagers in our town get unnatural urges. We try to correct these impure desires early—teach kids right from wrong. If you don’t nip these thoughts in the bud while they’re still young, they’ll manifest as behaviour in adolescence. We pull offending children up and tell them, again and again, from morning worship to Sunday school.

“Your ungodly impulses are a choice” we lecture. “You can choose Heaven or you can choose Hell. Which will it be?” For many youth, the threat of damnation is enough to set them on the right path. But there are those who cling to their perversions, convincing themselves that their lifestyle choice is the correct one.

If only we had beat it out of them. Maybe that could have saved Charlie.

I’ll never understand what compels teens to commit such awful sin. Some say that it’s the media, corrupting the minds of the youth. Others think that it’s just the primal evil of humanity, inevitably seeping through. All I know for sure is that these teenagers go about defiling the Lord, and our town, remorselessly.

There are probably those out there who would call us intolerant. That’s fine by us. We believe that there are some transgressions that simply shouldn’t be tolerated, under any circumstances.

And we will never tolerate abduction, torture and murder.

No, I don’t have a gay son. I don’t have a gay son, because those twisted fucking bastards killed him.