Follow-up: lesbian high schooler's promFollow

Nope.

What I learn here is, much like the debate on marriage, Gbaji takes an outdated and much debated (and likely made up) "reason" for an event, and tries to spin it to explain his ideology.

Gbaji, just no. Throw text all you like, focus on the clothing instead on the date, insist that discrimination on the basis of sex holds no similarities to discrimination on other factors like race, but in the end the only one who comes out as a liar is you. Not Belkira, not any of the rest of us, but you.

Only thing I agree with you is that the school "won," in the sense that they effectively kept Constance McMillen from attending her senior prom. Unlike you, I feel it's abhorrent. You are happy with discrimination on the basis of sexual preference because to you tradition overrules it. That's why you're not a progressive. It is an ideological difference, and luckily in this case (luckily in our progressive view), the judge believes the law agrees that discrimination is a bad thing. That doesn't make the judge bad; it just means that an expert in law made a decision BASED ON LAW that you disagreed with because of your own ideology, not based on any kind of law. Don't take it personally.

If she attended a school in which the rules said she had to bring a guy as a date and must wear a dress, you'd support her decision to sue the school on the grounds that her rights were being violated. I'll hold out the possibility that you're not seeing what I'm talking about.

I don't doubt that you think a school should have less strict rules. I doubt that you actually think that such rules would constitute a violation of a students constitutional rights unless she was a lesbian. That was the position I was saying you wouldn't take if she were straight. I hope you can see why I was so floored when you said that you would. It just flied in the face of any sort of reason at all.



Some schools have very informal events which they call proms. At my school, You purchased a "bid" to attend the prom. You had to list the couple on the bid (ticket basically). The couple had to be approved to attend. You were required to come dressed in a tuxedo for the guys, and a formal dress for the girls. That's what a prom has been traditionally for many schools.

The fact that your school treated it like just another semi-formal dance does not mean that schools which treat it more seriously and more traditionally should not be allowed to do so. That's kinda the point, isn't it?



It's a dress code. What's not analogous about it? Again, I get that some schools have done away with the really formal trappings of prom, but that doesn't mean that all schools must. Shouldn't it be up to the community in which the school exists to decide their own rules for prom? Why does one girl (much less random person on the internet) get to tell them what rules their events must have or not have?



A dress code? Schools impose dress codes on students every single day. Why is this different? You're not now going to say that you would support a students right to wear anything she wanted during normal school hours, would you? Would it prompt you to do so if I presented a scenario in which a lesbian wanted to wear an offensive anti-religious shirt and then asked if you would support a religious students right to wear an anti-gay shirt?

Or would that get you spun around? It might just be funny to watch, but I'm getting tired of this. Schools do have the authority to impose dress codes and rules of conduct on the students while they are attending school functions. Period. That is not in question, is it? I would hope not...


So. If they do have that authority, then it's not really a matter of rights in general, but a matter (as I've said all along) of a special "right" because this girl is a lesbian. Which I think is a crock, but on which we're certainly free to debate. I just ask that you not insist that there's some fundamental right held by a student to wear whatever they want or attend with whomever they want at a school function. They don't have that right. They have never had that right. It's only when we start adding in some other factors (like being gay) that suddenly people start talking about such things as though they are rights.




Hehehe...

Please show me where in the constitution it says that a lesbian has a right to attend a prom wearing a tuxedo. I'd love to see it, cause I'm pretty sure it's not there. In fact, I'm quite sure the constitution does say that any power not held by the federal government passes to the states. And most state constitutions pass power not taken down to the local level.

I would argue that it's a violation of the rights of all of the people living in that community who collectively determined a set of rules for their prom for their kids to have that choice overruled by a US judge despite an utter lack of any legal grounding at all. Unless the constitution or federal law specifically grants the government power over dress codes and ticket sales at school proms, doesn't the authority to make such decisions fall to the state and then the local levels? Yes. It does.


This isn't a violation of rights. You don't have a right to attend a prom. That's just silly.

I'm not sure how many times I have to say it, but I DON'T CARE ABOUT THE TUX PART. I explained the rational they used, but personally I think it's not important. please address the real issue. Oh wait you won't because it's not defensible.

Edited, Mar 24th 2010 10:32pm by Xsarus

If you said this before I missed it. Good. I see this as reason enough to cause a fuss. A lot of people will take the easy way for them, and go with two different partners as the school suggested, and I don't hold it against them, it's probably the route I'd take in this case. However for someone to take a stand is completely appropriate. So take the "dress code" out of it, you agree with the decision.

For the dress code, he cited quite a few cases that established precedent. In that case you pretty much have to take it to a higher court to get a decision.

Edited, Mar 24th 2010 10:41pm by Xsarus

Had she not been a lesbian, this entire issue would not have even come up. The student's orientation and the issue at hand are not mutually exclusive. What you're trying to say is, "What if a straight girl asked to take her girlfriend to the prom?"

Sheer cognitive dissonance. Also: Dress codes are socialism.

Edit: Pardon me if I said that after someone else posted. Its 03:00, and I didn't notice a hefty amount of posts under mine.

Edited, Mar 25th 2010 3:11am by Ninomori

I'm not sure how you get from "asking permission ahead of time" to "simply disobeying", but... yeah.

It would have been worth suggesting, I would think.

Yes. I understand. That's part of my point.



Yes. With "girlfriend" in this context not having to be sexual in nature. If two straight girls want to go to the prom and don't have dates, and the rules require that they have dates who are boys, could they challenge that rule in court? Would they win?

And if they did challenge it in court, and we were for some reason discussing the issue, would anyone actually think that the prom rule violated their rights? I'm sorry. I still don't think anyone would make that argument. There's just no grounds for it at all, is there?

Belkira insisted that she would. I found that odd and unlikely. I still do...

That's not what I said either. I said that the school should allow same sex couples to attend the prom. It's not about this one specific girl. I was stating what I thought the schools rules should be. However, I don't live in their community. It's up to them to create their own rules. And they did so. And having done so, it's wrong of one girl to assume that she doesn't have to abide by those rules because they don't allow her to do what she wants. I don't think that the school should be forced to let her go to the prom. I do think that the school should change it's rules to allow same sex couples too attend the prom. Those may seem like the same thing to you, but they aren't.

Similarly, I don't think that the court should force them to change their rules either. They should change their rules because they believe that the rules need to be changed. It should come from the community of people on whom those rules are imposed. It's about maximizing liberty. If each community gets to make their own rules for things like this, then some will make good rules and some will make bad ones. However, if one community makes a bad set of rules and I live in that community I can work with the rest of the folks I live with to change the rules. If I don't live in that community, I'm not affected. If instead, we decide to have one set of rules for the whole country and all communities must abide by them, then while we might idealize a situation in which the rules we set are always going to be good, that's a pretty foolish assumption, right? What we've done is assured that if a bad rule is created, it now affects everyone. So even though your community might have selected a set of rules it sees as "good", if a higher authority has mandated a set of rules you consider "bad", you're stuck. We now have a situation were people in other communities get to impose their will on you, and you have only a small amount of say in it.


That's why conservatives oppose big government. I think that liberals get so caught up in the individual causes and the "good" which can be done by using the power of the federal government to enforce their views on social issues, that they lose sight of the bigger picture. Because the precedent's set in these types of cases aren't really about one girl and a prom. They are about the degree to which the federal government may force every community in the country to comply with a single position on everything. That's the danger...



I'll also point out a side aspect to this. I often argue that liberals are authoritarian in nature. This is exactly why. Liberals not only think it's "ok" for the government to step in and enforce a set of rules they like, but they believe that the government "must" do this. Failing to do so is seen as a failure to protect some right or other (sadly, with "rights" increasingly becoming defined to mean whatever the hell someone wants at any given time).


The evidence of this is in this very thread. The assumption that it's somehow an outrage if the court doesn't step in and force this school to act. Heck. When I said that I agreed that the school should allow same sex dates at prom, you apparently couldn't even imagine that I would still disagree with the ruling. It's ingrained in your political thinking that if you hold a position on something that it's right for the government to enforce it. That's why your position is authoritarian. It's also why it's dangerous. It's not about the positions on any given issue. It's about your willingness to allow the government to enforce those positions on a nationwide scope.


It all seems well and good when the things they are enforcing are things you agree with. But what happens when they aren't? Wouldn't we be better of in the "each community creates it's own laws" scenario? I think we would be...

Plus, means justify the ends is just plain retarded.

The specific cause on which the case is ruled doesn't change the resulting increase in federal power which arises as a result. Long after this student has moved on the precedent that the federal court can meddle in what should be a purely local affair will not only stand, but certainly be expanded upon.


I also disagree that civil liberties require court intervention. That's kinda the point, isn't it? Doubly so when the "liberty" in this case is so stretched as to be almost invisible. When did attending a prom become a constitutional right? Now if the police were coming into her home and arresting her because she is a lesbian, we'd have a legitimate case in which her liberties are being infringed. But not being allowed to take a same sex date to a prom because the rules a school set for attendance of said prom don't allow that?

That's a constitutional issue? Really? I don't think so...