Stop christian bigots destroying goth groups

To: Yahoo Inc,

On July 15th, 2005 a group of narrow minded christian hypocrocrites attacked and somehow destroyed my gothic Yahoo! group 'GothTeen', a community for 13-19 yo to talk about all things goth, post fan fiction, poetry and alt religions. They claim it was closed down for abuse related issues by Yahoo, however I cannot understand why Yahoo would delete my group, as it contained nothing abusive, and as far as I can see did not break any of Yahoo's TOS, and the only abusive messages on there were posted by those bigoted lunatics.

The people who had it destroyed were several christian anti-goth crusaders who started abusing me and my fellow members because of some of our members' religious beliefs, sexual persuasions, and because of the way we look/dress. This all started when the ringleader of these christian bigots, a man named Rev RG Green, joined our group and posted a message warning us we had 24 hours to take down our group.

Here is the message he posted

"Dear list members,

It is truly unfortunate that this group has come to our attention. We feel that this sickening group, by advocating the gothic lifestyle to innocent children who do not completely comprehend the dangers they face, should be classified as child abuse. Furthermore, we feel that the Moderators of this group are probably nothing more than sick sexual predators who are using this community to groom innocent underage children into a world of vampirism, wicca, suicide and self-mutilation, and probably pedophiles who belong in jail.

However, because I am a reasonable man and open to negotiations, so I shall give you 24 hours to take this abusive group off the internet. If you do not comply then we will be forced to do it for you.

I truly hope you understand that this action is for your own best interest. If you are not willing to protect yourselves then we must take it upon ourselves to do it for you. We are trying to protect innocent children here. You may not agree with everything we do, but something must be done to make you all realize the way you are living is wrong.

Let me tell you something you may not want to hear. Goth is dangerous. Very dangerous. What is worrying is that you children don't even realize the danger they you are getting into until it is too late. It is a slippery slope that takes you down, and down fast. It leads to a life of sin, child abuse, homosexuality, rape, vampirism, crime, illegal drugs and illicit acts. It is sad to see younger and younger children being sucked into its world of sin, paranoia, hate and pain. Goth is a culture that makes violence in schools, anti-social behavior, suicide and self-harming seem 'cool'. So many gothic children attempting suicide, slitting their wrists because their friends encourage it and their gothic idols make suicide a viable and attractive option. Dressing as whores and surrounding themselves with evil images, horror movies, dressing in black like they are attending a funeral. If you live your life like every day is your funeral how could you not come to an irrational conclusion ? By the very nature of the Gothic subculture is what causes children to harm themselves. This is a culture that no good decent parent wants their children dabbling in, it leads to long-term mental problems if not caught soon enough. Make no mistakes, these groups are NOT run by children, they are run by Gothic predators and sick Gothic peer groups. Encouraging children to dress in filthy whorish goth clothing for their sickening sexual gratifications. Brainwashing innocents into mindless goth sheep who hate the world. It is disgusting. If you all opened your eyes you would see that God has given us a wonderful world and you could be so much more.

It sickens me that groups like this exist, but not for much longer. We will not stop in our task of wiping all abusive groups which promote child abuse off the internet. We will do what must be done to protect our children.

I will pray for you all.

Rev RG Green."

You can see from the above message how disturbed these people are. After that many of my members posted messages to defend ourselves, standing up for our own alternative way of life. This is when the abuse started. One of the christian hypocrites named rachel started posting very abusive and derogatory emails to my members, on and off-list. Many of my members were hacked and emails started appearing on the group that appeared to be coming from them, but weren't. They somehow locked me out my own group so I was unable to kick them off. Then our group was bombarded with spam, and members were unable to post normally with the sheer volume of abuse.

After 24 hours of constant abuse they informed us our time was up and they were going to have our group hacked, and the next hour it was gone, along with my and several of my members email accounts. We have tried contacting Yahoo several times, but they have just ignored us and seem to be siding with these bigots.

We are now contacting the ACLU, NAACP, the FTC, bigclassaction.com and also lawyers as we have lost several original stories, poetry and fan-fiction which cannot be replaced and a YEAR'S worth of hard work and many members' personal photo collections.

I would hope that Yahoo will reinstate my group, and take action against the real criminals here, as the goth population have been victimized long enough...

[Petition authors note : This petition has been removed twice now without my wishes. This is due to person or persons unknown contacting PetitionOnline "claiming" to be me. I would like to ask PetitionOnline NOT to remove this petition again without consulting me beforehand. Thanks.]

Sincerely,