Lesbian Teen Sent to Fake PromFollow

No. Just fucking NO, *******. The school cancels a Prom, and the girl who was not allowed to bring a date of the same sex or wear the mandated male attire is to blame? NO. The school is completely acting within their right, but THEY canceled Prom, not this 18 year old. God forbid a girl wants to attend her senior prom with her partner and the sanctioned attire (even of the opposite sex). She didn't ask to go in rags; she wanted to go in a tux to prom, with her girlfriend. Lordy no, can't have that!



We realize COMPLETELY who is at fault here: the school. What is amazing is that people like you think this girl is in the wrong, and even think that other students should be suing her when she is already in the legal right. Her rights were violated, as found by a court of the United States. I agree the courts cannot and should not make a private function (ie, a party thrown by the parents of the kids without any input from the school itself) invite this girl. I also agree that the majority of her schoolmates made it very clear that they do not like, nor want, Constance McMillan in their town, at their functions, or as part of their community. Vut I vehemently disagree that she is in the wrong; her rights were violated (keep in mind you can kvetch until the cows come home, but this is a matter of record now, not speculation), and instead of taking the moral high road, the parents of her schoolmates chose to insult her and snub her by throwing a second Prom and not inviting her.

This looks like what it is: a case of small town homophobia with people ganging up on a butch lesbian, as much to punish her for being different as for making their town look terrible. And it makes plenty of people (such as yourself) gleeful to see her get punished for trying to enact a change.

Personally I think she should take some of the celebrities up on their offer of a Prom, and get her girlfriend and those 7 other people into a swanky party across the country with famous folks. Rub some elbows, take a ton of pictures, and enjoy her 15 minutes of fame before completing the rest of her year in school and getting the heck out of that town.

But more than that, I feel sorry for her. She didn't want notoriety. She didn't want a fancy Prom. She wanted to go to Prom with her S.O., wearing a tuxedo (which is fine attire for Prom), with all the classmates she has spent at least 3 1/2 years with. Instead she got thrown into a media battle, and her schoolmates line up against her, and was shown once and for all that her town was glad to ignore her until she wanted to show she was different... but being different isn't allowed. GG, Fulton Mississippi.

I was going to make a comment about homophobic gbaji is.


Then I realized that he and his fellow travelers would make the same argument if this girl was a Jew or black.

Because, y'know, if the citizens of this community hates you it doesn't matter what they hate you for. As long as you are different, that's excuse enough to be disenfranchised.

Hey moron, I was discussing the attitude of the townfolk, not the law.

ALSO: The "liberal" comment was pretty funny, too. You get dumber every ******* day.

ALSO: ALSO: Thanks for proving my point, douche.

I thought this had already been posted and clarified. The court ordered the parents organizing the first private prom to invite her and allow her to attend, dressed as she wanted, and with the date she wanted. So they complied with the order.

The court did not require that the other students all attend this prom, nor did the court prohibit them from organizing a second prom and not inviting her to that one. That's what happened. This wasn't a "fake" prom. It was the exact prom which the parents organized when the school canceled the original one and was the current "prom" when the initial court rulings were handed down.


If it later became a "fake" prom, it is entirely because most of the people didn't want to attend the one which the judge and lawyers cooked up. Hence my comment that she was to blame for that prom being "lame". Had she not made an issue of it, all the kids could have attended one prom (including the deaf kids), and they all could have had exactly the experience they expected. Even she could have attended if she'd wished. She just would have had to wear a dress (OMG! Shocker!) and arranged for someone to do a date swap to invite her girlfriend (something commonly done). Because she got the ACLU involved, the whole thing was a disaster for her and the handful of other students not invited to the alternate prom. See how that works?


So yeah. Her fault. 100%...

What ******* world does gbaji live in where this isn't blatant prejudice?

Rereading the links, I see that yeah, the real prom held by the school met the demands and the students did their own thing. So, I'll give you that point.

I still don't say it's her fault. The school made her into an enemy by canceling the prom in the first place. It's not her fault she got alienated. She did the right thing by asking for permission, was denied over a bigoted reason, they canceled the WHOLE prom over the desire of one person, and essentially made her into an evil wench.

Legally, it's all gravy. Morally, though, **** 'em. If I were her, I'd probably be happier I don't have to stomach a bunch of people I'd rather forget anyway.

She got lawyers involved. Of course it's her fault! :)



They canceled the prom when she sued them (with the ACLU's help). Is that really such an unusual response? Schools do this sort of thing all the time. Someone sues because the fund raising event is a car wash, and the handicapped kids can't participate. The school responds by canceling the car washes and the students have to find another way to raise funds for the band, or whatever. Or they get sued because their kid didn't get to wear the T-shirt he wanted, or some other kid wore a T-shirt their kid found offensive, so the school just bans all T-shirts with any writing or message on them. This happens all the time in school districts.

Some of you seem to act like this is unusual. It's not. That's how schools typically react to a lawsuit involving any sort of school activity. They shut down the activity. Now in the case of a bake sale, it's not a huge deal. In the case of a prom, people tend to notice a bit more...



/shrug


Do you think her course of action helped though? I don't. Not even a little bit. An issue which could have been resolved via communication and compromise was effectively blown into nastiness by her choice to use lawyers. As I said above, that pretty much never ends well...

I explained this in the last thread on this subject. Many schools have a "one guy, one girl per ticket" rule because they don't want people showing up stag, or showing up with a friend instead of a date. While that obviously makes things a bit trickier for a gay student, if you don't have that rule, then you'll see people just bringing friends or siblings, or whatever to the prom. For those for whom prom is about a romantic "coming of age" sort of event, this is not the atmosphere desired.


It has *nothing* to do with going after gay couples. They just happen to want to bring dates which violate the rules in place. Also, as I pointed out before, it's trivially easy for a gay couple to get around this if they want. She choose to push the issue instead of finding an easy solution. There are legitimate reason for the rules in place. They are not innately and exclusively there to hurt gay couples. To bring the comparison back into place, there is no reason to prohibit black kids (or mixed couples) from attending a prom except for racism. There are certainly legitimate reasons for requiring couples consisting of one guy and one girl to buy tickets together for a prom.

You cannot assume differently just because it suits your position on this issue.


And for completenesses sake: As I also stated in the previous thread. When you switch from protecting against prohibitions based on who people are to protecting against prohibitions based on what people do, you get yourself onto a nasty slippery slope. It's quite clear that if I treat you differently because of your skin color, or your sex, or your faith, or your orientation, I'm committing an act of bigotry and potentially violating your rights. But what if I treat different actions differently, and someone claims that some action is associated with who they are?

Is that bigotry as well? I don't think so. And I think we're risking insanity if we try to walk down that path. There are just certain social issues which the law shouldn't get itself involved in. Just as this student discovered, it never ends well for anyone.

Edited, Apr 5th 2010 10:24pm by gbaji

No, it's about a coming of age. And by coming of age, I mean licentious premarital sex.

Technically, I think the school being a governmentaly funded institution must follow govt laws/regulations be they state or national. If they want to have the govt out of their business they should stop taking the money, and call themselves a private institution where they can teach/preach what they believe. They are not a private school and are not allowed to preach their religion to the students. I also fail to see how being homosexual is degrading to the prom function. I guess what I should be asking is how is homosexuality in any way related to a dress code?

I'd imagine it falls under anti-discrimination laws. They can set dress codes, basic codes of conduct, etc, but I don't imagine they have the authority to ignore laws prohibiting discrimination in education and public functions.

Further, while I do agree that they would have been within their rights to have a private function on the same night as a school one and not invite her, that doesn't sound like what happened. It sounds like they had a semi-official function, which the court had mandated she be allowed to attend, pretended to cancel it and created another one as a diversion. That's sketchy behavior at best. They should have been more open with it and kept the semi-official one and then had some kid's parents completely autonomously host an alternative party that was by-invitation only. They would not have been able to use school funds or have any aid from the school, but they would have been out in the open and easily within the law. Instead, they're now sitting in a gray area at best.

It's moronic, but I think I see why they did it. I'd imagine had they done it that way, maybe half the school would have gone to the official one and half to the "cool kids party". At which point they would not have driven home their point of shunning said girl, so they chose to go the shady route simply because they wanted to be ******


I thought that too at first, but now I think it was more than just students. Parents were involved as well, and they really should be beyond this kind of behavior. Unless of course their children tricked them into thinking the first "private" prom was canceled, at which point they're just gullible(meaning why not make a few calls to confirm it before helping organize the second one?) instead of ********.

Which laws? You can't just refer to an incredibly broad concept like "discrimination". You could argue that *anything* is discrimination (and by definition any "rule" is "discrimination" of some kind, so that's meaningless as well). The historical SCOTUS test for this is that you have to show that the discrimination both unfairly targets a single group *and* that said discrimination serves no other legitimate purpose.

Given that rules requiring prom tickets consist of a male/female couple (often with age and school attendance requirements as well) have existed long before anyone even considered a gay high school couple attending shows that the purpose of the rules have a purpose other than strictly that of preventing gay couples from attending prom. As I've stated repeatedly, the most common reason for this is simply to ensure that everyone in attendance is a "couple". Removing this rule just to allow gay couples to attend as a couple would presumably result in many times more people showing up to prom without a "date". Since that is the stated purpose of the rule, it passes the discrimination test. Doubly so, since there are other ways around this *and* the rule in question isn't a law, but is purely at the discretion of the school itself. The rule does not require legislation to change, so it should be held to a lower standard than something which is an actual law.



That's now how I read any of the stories about this at all. They had the "official" prom planned. Then she sued, so they canceled that one. Then they had a semi-official prom planned by a group of parents at the time the court handed down it's decision. The girl's lawyers obtained a ruling that the girl must be allowed to attend that particular event as she wished (wearing tux and bringing girlfriend). They did not cancel that event, or switch anything around. That was the event she attended.

What happened was that a group of parents planned a third event and didn't invite her. And most of the kids went to that one instead of the semi-official one. There was no deception. Just no one chose to attend the prom in which the court ordered changes. Why is that surprising? They complied with the letter of the courts ruling, which is no more than she should expect.



Er? That's exactly what they did. And almost the entire student body went to that one instead...



I'm reasonably sure that *both* of those proms were paid for without any funds or aid from the school. At the very least, I'm sure that the second (third?) prom was. It was completely private. As I stated earlier, it speaks volumes to the fact that the school prom rules were in accordance with the majority of the students at the school that virtually all of them choose to do this.

I know that in our world of "taking sides" for or against, it may be hard to believe, but my position here is purely about the fact that the community as a whole should decide the rules for events like this together, not a group of lawyers. If the majority want a prom in which anyone can show up dressed however they want and with anyone (or no one), then that's perfectly ok with me. It's their choice. It's not about being pro or anti gay, and I think it's wrong to make it about that. It's about a group of people getting to decide their own rules for their own social events, without national level politics getting in the darn way!

[quote]It's moronic, but I think I see why they did it. I'd imagine had they done it that way, maybe half the school would have gone to the official one and half to the "cool kids party". At which point they would not have driven home their point of shunning said girl, so they chose to go the shady route simply because they wanted to be **************

They did do it that way. And it wasn't even close to half and half. Like I said. Speaks volumes about how out of sync with the community around her her actions were. We can sit here and condemn them for it, I suppose, but it's *their* community. Who are we to force them to do things the way we'd do them?




You're right and wrong I think. Parents were clearly involved (someone had to pay for it). But I suspect the reaction was more like: They got a court order requiring that we change the rules for the prom? Ok. Let her go to that prom. We'll pay to have another dance with our own rules in place and invite people who think that's what a prom should be.


At the end of the day, the parents and students made their decision, didn't they? She got her day in court. She got the prom she wanted. But was it really worth it? I don't think so...