As political science valedictorian Matt Easton took the podium Friday at the Brigham Young University commencement ceremony, he congratulated his classmates on their victories — congrats to those who earned a difficult and rigorous degree, who raised children while studying, who stood in the face of adversity to make campus better.
But he also celebrated his own personal victories: surviving a hit-and-run by a deer that required hernia surgery, learning how and whom to cherish after his mother’s terminal cancer diagnosis, and announcing publicly, for the first time during graduation, that he is “proud to be a gay son of God.