"You shouldn't be gay"

Screw you Mr. David Davis. What right do you have to harm the children you are charged to care for.

http://www.wjhg.com/home/headlines/15079096.html

Apparantly he makes fun of people with Down’s syndrome as well, calling them “retards”. Class act all the way, asswipe.

I know the dope has rules about posting e-mail addresses, but I will note that Mr. David Davis, principal of **Ponce De Leon High School ** in **Florida ** has a public e-mail address that is easy to google with just a couple of key words. Even better, there is a link to his superiors at the district on the school’s site.

I know I have excercised my 1st amendment rights and I hope there are others who might do the same.

This douchebag needs to be kept away from children forever.

I am not gay, but I have been on the recieving end of the psychological torture that these types of “educators” like to practice, and this fills me with rage.

After reading a few of the comments, I’m going to have to side with the principal on this one.

I think that it’s pretty obvious that he has not been able to concentrate in school for the past several years. Probably blinded by rainbow belts.

Yes!..not In Texas!!!

By reading the comments attached to that story, one wonders why spell checking software is not available for purchase in the state of Florida.

Eh, Florida schmorida. It’s the panhandle, or as we Orlandoish types like to call “lower Alabama.”

Mmm… watermelon country.

Sorry, I didn’t see that in the story. Was that something you gleaned from the Comments section (TLDR, well I didn’t read all of it; just some self-preservation at work)? Or does it appear in another source, and, if so, would you be good enough to post a link?

I must say, the principal sounds like a piece of work, based on the story as it appears in the link. OTOH, I note that the link is to a TV newscast’s website.

It was in comments, possibly from another site belonging to a local paper. I hope this story goes national.

Other students have commented that the guy gets off on starting trouble. Well, he’s started it allright. I say let him taste it. Enforcing policy is one thing but telling a student that they “Shouldn’t be gay” is just too much. He “Shouldn’t be in an Education Career”.

The problem is that I believe (and lawyers can correct me if I’m wrong) the court has found that minors do not have 1st Amendment rights in speech and dress while they are in school, so no matter how stupid I think the Principle’s statements are, I’m not sure they are basis for a free speech lawsuit. IANAL, I welcome correction on this.

The bit with the Downs syndrome namecalling comes from a comment by “concerned mother” at PDL:

I reviewed several of the Supreme Court’s decisions on free speech for a paper last semester, and found that student free speech is only unprotected when it interferes with a public school’s academic mission. Which this absolutely does not. In fact, IIRC, the free speech of a group of students with a banner reading “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” (which was either intentionally inflammatory or devoutly Rastafarian, and how many devout Rastafarians have you met in American high schools?) was protected at a school-sponsored event just because it didn’t occur during class time or some such thing. So minors certainly do not have their free speech rights stripped away simply on account of being under 18, and the case has to be pretty compelling for the Supreme Court to cancel those rights even during school activities. By “pretty compelling”, I mean that if the student didn’t blatantly commit the action in question specifically to troll–and, in many cases, even if they did–it’s an automatic win for the student or at least a very tough case for the school.

And as a volunteer at my former high school’s Gay/Straight Alliance, let me say that I’m really disappointed that this has happened in the first place and that it’s as much of an uphill battle as it seems to be.

Oh fuck those comments are depressing.

:mad:

Yep. Chances are the district bigwigs, the typical voter, and most of the faculty down there are probably all right on board with this kind of thing.

Lotsa rednecks in Florida. Just becuase it has Disney World doesn’t mean the rest of the state isn’t part of the south. And there are lots of old people that think Pat Robertson can heal their kidney through the teevee and that God is going to send a meteor to punish the Disney Company for hiring fags. :rolleyes:

/Florida is the only state with it’s own FARK tag for a reason

http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/comm/free_speech/tinker.html

It may not be about rights, HW. Just power, and sadism.

Many people who get into teaching do it for laudable reasons, and with the best of intentions.

Not all, however.

What is particularly sad and infuriating, is that I can believe this asswipe actually believes his intentions are laudable.

My bolding.

If you don’t know about Florida’s Farkiness you can Google on Fark to understand Happy Wanderer’s comment, or you can just click on the link below.

http://www.sptimes.com/2005/12/29/Floridian/The_big_squeeze.shtml

I was inaccurate in my first post when I said “the court has found that minors do not have 1st Amendment rights in speech and dress while they are in school”, a better way to express what I meant would be “Schools have the right to limit a student’s 1st Amendment rights to free speech while they are at school”; and the link you’ve provided seems to support that:

Right?

It is. The programmers all went to UF. <rimshot>

Yeah . . . Holmes County? Might as well be Alabama.

I take serious exception to your characterization of my home. It’s not the “rest of the state”. There are threeish distinct areas in Florida, and only 1 of them is in the south.

What the hell? Did the ‘-’ key on an editor’s keyboard get stuck or something?

Oh sweet Jesus… I thought the comments from an ALLEGED high school student were bad, but that parent takes the cake. Did none of these people ever darken the doorstep of a classroom? If my eight year old wrote like that, he’d have a tutor in a New York minute.

And I live in CA, where we are 46th out of the 50 states in spending per child. Yeah, my kids go private…