In case anyone was wondering if the entire state of Florida has lost its mind, given all the recent anti-evolution proclamations, well wonder no more. Here is a school that truly has the best interests of the children at heart, and has consequently outlawed…the rainbow:
”The ACLU has filed suit against Ponce de Leon High School in Florida on behalf of several students who have been forbidden from any form of expressive support for gay rights - t-shirts, buttons, even a rainbow symbol on a bookbag or a notebook. The school board is taking the bizarre position that any such symbol is evidence that students belong to an "illegal organization" and that all pro-gay speech is inherently disruptive. “
An illegal organization? Funny, I don’t recall there being a system of organizations being declared legal and illegal in the United States. Freedom of assembly is one of our fundamental freedoms, and if anyone wants to gather together to support gay rights, or gloomy rights, or any kind of rights one might like to envision, they have a right to do so (just don’t say “Al Quaeda” when you do it.) Just what are these illegal organizations?
” As you know, Illegal organizations are defined by the School Board as any attempt to use the school day for activities that are not school related or school sponsored. Illegal organizations are, therefore, prohibited as they interfere with the educational process.”
You mean like handing out Bibles? Funny how they never seem so concerned with the connection between school and activities when Bibles are involved.
And I LOVE this “inherently disruptive” shit. In other words, if we have enough bigots in our community that one person wearing a rainbow is going to cause coniptions, then by golly you strangers are disruptive all right.
Apparently, all this concern for the students’ personal decorations revolves around an incident wherein the principle told a student she should not be gay and should not talk about being gay. The students wore the symbols of gay pride to show support for the student. And the principle, in typical pigheaded style, suppressed opposition he couldn’t defeat intellectually.
This brought a lawsuit from the ACLU, which the school district is sure to lose. This also adds to the stories on the subject of homosexuality that raises my suspicions that rabid anti-gay people are themselves gay, and their vitriol arises from their suppression of self. This principle’s behavior is bizarre in the extreme.
Hat tip: Ed Brayton
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2 comments:
This is an absolutely typical example of the moral incompetence that is driving the US full tilt BACKWARDS with respect to the recognition of basic human rights. As gay Americans slowly manage to secure some of the rights that heterosexual Americans take for granted, either because they already have them or do not need them, so the right wing, reactionary, bigoted fools who oppose equality under law and who neither know nor care about the US Constitution's guarantees of freedom of expression and association do whatever they can to fan the flames of hatred and to showcase its ever-present companion, ignorance.
The students who wear rainbow t-shirts and who support their gay peer are infinitely wiser than those who have been tasked with educating them. These students have become teachers – and their pupils are dull, morally obtuse half-wits.
I immigrated to the US as soon as I graduated from college in South Africa (where I was born and raised), selecting the US as my new home and nation because of the values and principles to which the US claims to subscribe -- principles codified at the Constitutional level, in such forms as the guarantees of equal protection under law and freedom of intimate and expressive association (see the Fourteenth and First Amendments, respectively). I was never prouder than on the day that I was handed my Certificate of Naturalization -- I was never more certain that I had been right, and that I had left hatred and ignorance behind.
Now I am ashamed and embarrassed.
I moved to the UK, which recognizes gay marriage in all but name, last year.
There is strong support for the contention that rabid homophobes are themselves secretly gay. A study conducted at the University of Georgia in 1996 by researchers Adams, Wright, and Lohr found that heterosexual men who were extremely homophobic became sexually aroused when viewing gay pornography, whereas heterosexual men who were on good terms with gay men did not become aroused when viewing such pornography. A plethysmograph does not lie. (See http://gayequalityandthelaw.townhall.com/ for more information about this study.)
The law is clear with respect to this issue. The US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which has jurisdiction over Florida, addressed this very issue in Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Alliance v. Pryor (1997). The fact patterns in these two instances are very similar. The school district will lose – big time.
Why does it take a federal case to teach something as basic as the meaning of the First Amendment?
PHILIP CHANDLER
Because the religious right doesn't care for the first amendment, they only care about the second.
Thanks for the study info.
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