http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_lesbian_prom_date
I didn’t go to my high school prom and if anything similar to this incident happened at my own high school, it would’ve made me that much less motivated to go. A lesbian teen asked the school to allow her to bring her girlfriend in a tuxedo to the prom in order to get around a prohibition in the rules that required the date to be the opposite sex. Though that may not have been her intention it seems a reasonable compromise to at least conform to some outdated idea of gender roles and have one partner wear male clothes to the prom. But instead of the school rejecting her request and returning her money, getting back the prom tickets and solving the problem without a big ruckus, they CANCEL THE PROM ENTIRELY. I don’t know what the administrators could be thinking when they are quoted as cancelling the prom "due to the distractions to the educational process caused by recent events." Because a lesbian couple distracts from the educational process in Mississippi more than it distracts anywhere else, it seems. We had a gay student at my high school and we’re not exactly in the most enlightened area of Tennessee ourselves and there was no issue in terms of him being at the school, let alone coming to the prom. But I seem to remember he came alone; or he may have transferred because of similar issues with prom rules that exist in our own district.
The point comes across negatively in that the administration seems to think that just because two women who are romantically involved come to a prom, albeit in gender divided clothes, it will distract from the educational process; even though the high school educational process that they no doubt speak of isn’t at a prom in the slightest. One has to wonder why they allow the “distracting lesbian” to even go to the school if she is such a problem to the prom. Though a bigger question remains as to how a prom getting cancelled or having a lesbian couple attend it would even affect educational process. The students must be that focused on whether everyone at the prom is paired up male and female that when the prom has one female/female couple they just can’t focus on their work because their latent homophobia is flaring up. Or they just think a prom is more important that getting an education in general. Not to mention the students are focusing some resentment towards the girl in question, since she supposedly “ruined their senior year”. Yeah, because a prom is what makes your senior year important: not the graduation ceremony and wearing the caps and gowns and being supportive of your fellow students for working hard. No, I suppose that whole process of getting the diploma is bollocks compared to dancing in a crowded room to bad music with hormonally challenged teens trying to get into the fairer sexes’ pants afterwards. Must be my imagination to think students favor a prom over graduating itself as the exemplar moment of their high school years.
The aftermath of this incident suggests that the ACLU is still pursuing the lawsuit against the school for violating the student’s rights. And the school’s suggestion has some merit; that is, allowing a private sponsor to hold the prom in lieu of a public school funded one.And according to the lesbian student she’d probably be excluded from that function as well, since it’s an old generation with money that doesn’t agree with GLBT in general. But one has to wonder why they even bothered to use school funding to sponsor a prom with a rule that they knew one GLBT student could violate with their same sex partner which would they cause them to inevitably cancel the prom entirely. Any student continuing to gripe to the teen in question must have too myopic a standard to consider their fellow student’s feelings about something that they didn’t want to ruin for everyone. One same sex couple at a high school dance shouldn’t rock the boat so much that the party gets cancelled. Students getting exposed to such a thing at their age is part of a larger educational process that the school alleged was being affected. There are going to be minorities in the real world that you don’t agree with, so you should get used to tolerating them even if you don’t agree with them. But this is Mississippi, so I’m not holding my breath that this is going to change anytime soon. Even if the ACLU’s lawsuit succeeds, the school may just elect to their idea of making a private prom instead. And if that occurs, the girl should just move on, in my opinion. This whole incident isn’t worth holding a grudge against inbred Podunk retards that think that two women or men having a committed “Biblical” relationship is still an abomination or some such rubbish. Move on and leave the state if necessary; real friends accept you as you are, as an individual who can change and progress in the world. Real friends don’t bitch at you for happening to love the same sex and wanting to go to the prom like other high school students.
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