Look, you ignorant shitsucking vermin. Inside the privacy of your own impermeable skulls, you are free to subscribe to whatever mediæval claptrap makes your shriveled hearts sing. Lock yourself in your basement and bewail the imagined corruption of the world until you spray your self-righteously judgmental spooge all over your cheap wood paneling. Close and lock your doors and murmur your caveman phrases to your fellow australopithecines, and gird your tiny brains with your meaningless self-serving rites. Knock yourselves right the fuck out.
But the very nanosecond you allow your stupidly irrational revulsions to escape your cranial prisons, when you attempt to visit your condemnatory fantasies upon the children of your community, when you somehow decide it’s acceptable to use the tools of a public governmental institution to grab your youth by their identities and drag them through the agony of your own personal moral gutter, you must not be surprised when you receive a swift and thundering punch to the fuckjuncture.
Are you so completely without emotional compass that you would applaud a man’s deliberate attempt to destroy a young person’s life while somehow overlooking the same man’s grotesque eyeballing of your daughter’s stripped torsos in his hunt for nothing more than words of moral support? Seriously? That’s okay with you? Well, spread your legs, because here’s a thundering punch coming your way.
How can we still be stuck here? How can we have made so little progress? Leave aside the Neanderthal beliefs; those will continue to resist eradication for many generations, if they’re ever defeated. No: how is it possible that people can still use those beliefs to rationalize such a naked act of witchhunting? Have we not learned that loosing the reins on our hatreds leads to horrifying abuses?
Don’t bother to answer that. I already know. It’s rhetorical.
Really, the legal system should have 1)put him in jail and 2)made quite sure that the other prisoners knew he was in for “lift[ing] the shirts of female students”.
He lifted the shirts of several female students and the community doesn’t think he did anything WRONG? And then there is the whole “stay away from children” nonsense–are they back in the Dark Ages?
Oh, no worries, I’m with you on the condemnation of the homophobia, but if you can put that aside, we are still left with gross misconduct of a school administrator.
I wonder how that girl’s parents feel about her outting? And the girl, of course. There was a demonstration here at the local HS a few years ago re Gay Pride day and some kind of Day of Silence in Solidarity (I’m foggy on the details and my daughter who was heavily involved in it is not home) that was protested by some “Christian” group within the school. It made the evening news here. My point being that even in supposedly “liberal” Cook County suburbs, this is still a hot topic.
I find that frustrating and ludicrous. Future generations will look back at us and just shake their heads.
It seems from the article that the girl didn’t even sue – it was a supporter of hers that presumably was silenced that sued and won.
On your story, though, I have to say that I think there’s a difference between the school officials taking sides, as they did here, and where (if I read you right) a group of Christian students decide to protest. I’m all for the latter.
(That is, I’m all for students of any stripe to have the freedom to express their views; I’m not “all for” the particular view. As long as their “protest” didn’t seek to prevent the other side from having its say, and didn’t disrupt the educational environment, I got no beef.)
True enough–I wasn’t excusing his behavior or dismissing his homophobia, I was trying to say that if you take one element out of the context, you still have a school administrator who fucked up. He screwed up on many levels–so how the townspeople can scratch their heads in wonder at the outcry boggles my mind. You’re saying his lifting of the shirts can’t be taken out of context, but I think it can. There are (no doubt) any number of parents in this community who may look askance at gay rights, but would take umbrage at him “examining” their daughters. I think they would say, “he went too far.” That doesn’t excuse his other actions etc, I was just trying to say that there are more than two points on this spectrum (I do not agree with those who might say only that he went too far–he went so too far, he achieved warp speed, and I wish he had been fired altogether. How is a gay student supposed to deal with him as a teacher?)
Where do PUBLIC schools get off thinking they can do this sort of thing? Prayer in school, discrimination, unequal treatment etc–thank god for the ACLU at times like this.
First off, this shit is indefensible in my mind. The only thing wrong I see with the idea that this scumstain lost his position is that he’s still teaching. It’s him I’d want isolated from children if I had my way.
I also think that some people are getting their brushes out way to fast on this. But, I can’t comment more specifically on that, because of my own big brushes that I carry around everywhere.
The panhandle isn’t like the rest of Florida. It might as well be part of Georgia or Alabama. Except for South Padre, and the side of Tallahassee with the college, you can keep it.
I think you’ve got it right. Let’s say that the principal wasn’t looking for signs of “gayness” or “gay sympathizers”, plotting to contaminate our precious bodily fluids to turn us all into communists (I mean, gay people). Say he thought these girls were concealing weed under their shirts. Even in that case, surely a reasonable search policy would require something more like “march the girl to the nurse’s office, and have her, or a female teacher, or a female police officer, lift the shirt.” Simple contraband can’t justify conduct by a principal that’s akin to a strip-search. A weapons search might be different, but even a fundie would be hard-pressed to say there was that degree of urgency here.
This is obviously (understatement coming) unfortunate, but shouldn’t be that surprising. Even here at the Dope, up until a couple years ago when I and a couple other posters had a few, um, constructive temper tantrums, homophobic speech was given something of a pass as long as it was perceived to come from religious conviction. Not comparing the two situations on any kind of scale of severity; simply making the point that “religious tolerance” continues to be something of a blindspot on such issues.
Thank you. I didn’t think to come up with an analogy to clarify my point. :smack:
It’s ALL bad–the homophobia, the “searching”, the warning to stay away from children, the response of the town. Kudos to that mom and that girl who went to the ACLU. And may I say I have a deepening contempt for rural, fundamentalist America? (not that there isn’t wild ignorance etc in cities, just sayin’.)