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Lisa Derrick has done great work detailing the fake prom incident in Mississippi. In case you haven’t been following things, a lesbian student named Constance McMillen wanted to attend her high school prom with her girlfriend, and the school decided they’d rather shut down the prom than allow that. A court ruled that this violated McMillen’s rights and came close to ordering a prom, but parents organized a “private” prom for McMillen and the other students. Except it was a fake-out. The prom McMillen attended only included seven students, including her, her girlfriends, and two disabled students. Everyone else at the high school partied at another prom at a country club.
This is just unspeakably cruel, and an insult not only to the LGBT community but to the disabled. And this has justifiably angered the civil rights and civil liberties communities.
The ACLU thinks they’ve found a solution. In a letter to supporters, they highlighted a piece of legislation that would make cruelty like this illegal:
So many people have contacted us because they are outraged by this situation and want to do something. I can tell you from my conversations with Constance that there’s nothing she wants more than for these kinds of hurtful actions to end for students all across the country.
There’s a way we can all help Constance with that goal— by demanding that Congress pass the Student Non-Discrimination Act.
The Student Non-Discrimination Act would be the first comprehensive federal prohibition against discrimination in public schools based on a student’s sexual orientation or gender identity.
Discrimination and harassment are an unacceptable daily reality for too many LGBT students all across the country. If outrageous experiences like the one Constance McMillen has been through are going to end, we have to respond.
What’s the Student Non-Discrimination Act? It’s a piece of legislation quietly introduced by Rep. Jared Polis in January. According to Open Congress:
Under this bill, no school program that receives public funding would be allowed to exclude children because of their gender identity or sexual orientation, be they gay, transgender or straight. Harassment based on gender or sexual orientation, defined as “conduct that is sufficiently severe, persistent, or pervasive to limit a student’s ability to participate,” would also not be allowed as a sanctioned element of a public school program. If schools discriminate or sanction harassment in their federally funded programs, federal education agencies would be given the authority to terminate their funding.
The right obviously would point to this the same way that they point to ENDA, as a restriction on bigot’s right to discriminate. But given the profile of this incident, support could easily galvanize in the country for a corrective measure.
Change.org notes that the kind of discrimination McMillen experienced is happening all over the country, and SDNA would prohibit it. They have a quote from Rep. Polis, an openly gay member of Congress:
Congressman Jared Polis took a stand earlier this year to fight for LGBT students when he introduced the Student Non-Discrimination Act. “Like Title VI for minorities in the 60s and Title IX for women in the 70s,” Congressman Polis said at the time of the bill’s introduction, “my legislation puts LGBT students on an equal footing with their peers, so they can attend school and get a quality education, free from fear.”
I have a call in to Brian Branton, who handled LGBT issues for Rep. Polis, and I will let you know if I have more.
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the act seems like something very worthwhile (can it get passed?), but here the parents are claiming the real prom was a “private party”. If its “private”, federal law can’t touch it, right?
BUT as we pieced together on facebook, the secret prom wasn’t “private” at all – they even used the same props and themes that were supposed to be used for the SCHOOL-SPONSORED prom. people need to do dig into that more!: http://milowent.blogspot.com/2010/04/itawamba-private-prom-was-continuation.html
those parents are repulsive.
You think the Obama administration is gonna let a law like this get passed? Surely you jest.
now if we can only get the Hate Law a bit closer to the Patriot Act …
The only ways that I can think that would prevent this is by either
a) denying the students that harass, bully or shun from school related programs. Thus these students that attended the discriminatory party or dance in which the bulk (say a majority) of a class or school-sponsored group were invited, to the exclusion of others in that class or school-sponsored group would be banned from that activity or group, and if participation in that group had been completed…then the students would be banned from some other activity (such as graduation ceremonies, playoffs, other social events of groups they belonged to). If there were no other activities, then the students would have extracurricular activities taken off their transcripts and any organizations or groups that received transcripts would be notified of this revision.
If the school failed to undertake the above
b) denying the school programs the opportunity to use Federal funds for specific programs if their students act in a manner that is considered harassment, shunning, or bullying.
Congress doesn’t have the guts to enact something the right wing will surely seize on and call social engineering or what have you. And Orahma isn’t going to do the first thing about it. If he refuses to address Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, what are the chances he’s going to care about gay or handicapped students? Nice thought, wrong universe.
GAH!!!!! This reminds me of a scene from Tom Robbins’ novel of yore “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,” where Sissy Hankshaw (she of the giant thumbs) riles up rebellion when she’s sent to the “gimp” (or geek or whatever, mainly mentally and physically challenged students or students who are deemed “too ugly”) Prom, protesting how all of them are being treated as “less than” the other “perfect” students. Written in 1976, and here we are in 2010, and all we can say is: the more things change, the more they stay just the same.
For shame on all involved in this disgusting incident, where the disabled and the gays are shunned and effectively shamed for something that over which they have no choice. Good going to the parents who engineered this. Disgusting.
Obamarahma ain’t gonna do a thing about it. I mean: seriously? No way. My heart goes out to those students though. ugh.
I do not like to sterotype people and I am sure there are wonderful people that live in the South. However, there is an element of people in the South that you can never under estimate. The racism, bigotry, fundamentalism that permeates in places there is an embarrassment to the human race. Just watch the behavior of our GOP Southern elected officials and you get the message.
Social engineering. Oh noes! Just reading a bio of Ataturk, who abolished the sultanate, then the caliphate, complete reoriented the role of women in society, went to Latin instead of Arabic script, dereligionized the education system. Nope. It can’t be done.
Obama won’t let Nancy Pelosi bring ENDA to a vote as she promised to do before the current break; why would anyone think SNDA would be brought up? Why not add it to ENDA, anyway, since neither are going anywhere in this Congress?
“Unspeakably cruel????”
Absolute rubbish. As, say, opposed to Abu Graib? This sort of hyperbole backfires. Was it mean? Sure it was. Should the parents and school officials who conspired here be named and held out for shame? I would vote for that. But, get a grip.
It is unspeakably cruel. There are all kinds of unspeakable cruelty; they don’t have to be rated on a scale for merit.
For adults to force their religious-bias on children at a public school function in a manner which excludes some children and mentally torments them is unspeakably cruel. It’s the same kind of cruelty which breeds adults who later become even more cruel.
Think about it: the children attending this high school could find themselves in the U.S. military after DADT has been repealed. How will they deal with this if they aren’t receiving healthy messages about tolerance during their formative years? Will the children of these bigots believe they have the right to torment their fellow soldiers — let alone civilians whom they come in contact with?
These are not separate issues. It’s unspeakable cruelty and it’s the beginning of even more cruelty.
While I generally dislike the “soft” response, I really do feel sorry for the simpletons that saw an exclusive prom as the appropriate response. These are people, who by denying this girl and other “disabled” people a chance to be a part of the larger experience will spend the rest of their thinking lives, which may amount to a few weeks over the next 40 years, trying to figure out why they attacked those that they should have helped. Those that want laws to fix this want an external resolution. The hateful parents and teachers that set this up may never realize the harm they have done but it will be there none-the-less.
If more laws are passed to make this less acceptable then that is a good thing, but as already pointed out, there are already legal avenues for the federal officials to act on this and sadly we have to rely upon the current, Republican in all but name, administration to act. We need government officials, from Team Obama, that claim to be promoters of liberal values to actually prove that they mean the words they mouth. The fact that these alternate prom promoters saw this as a solution, rather than simply accepting things they were not in agreement with, shows that playing the uncommitted center leads to failure and mistreatment. This result comes from the failure of “libruls” to stand up on a wide range of issues almost as much as the hateful people that exclude those that they do not understand.
Yes, there is a scale. It is called getting perspective, and treating this situation as if it is unspeakably cruel devalues those events that truly are unspeakably cruel.
It is unspeakably cruel to treat the “other” the way the lesbian and learning disabled students were treated. It’s also unspeakably cruel to raise children so unprepared to deal with the 21st century as Constance’s exclusionary classmates are. I hope they don’t stray too far from their home in Mississippi, and enjoy making cars for Cheery, the Chinese auto manufacturer that’s on its way to their neighborhood.
So, you see this as the moral equivalent, of say, the three women gunned down in Afghanistan, two of whom were pregnant? Or the murder of Matthew Shepard? There are distinctions in the magnitude of the offense.
Give it a rest, aardvark. The fact that there are worse things in the world is no reason to dismiss this, which, whether you mean to or not, is exactly what you’re doing.
You know, that is just such a dishonest crock. Nowhere, ever, did I dismiss the seriousness of the issue. What I asked for is that folks put it in a rational and reasonable perspective.
Yawn.
America is a cruel country. And perhaps always was.