Though students have expressed an interest in joining and teachers have agreed to sponsor it, efforts to start a gay/lesbian support group at a Wilson County high school have hit a roadblock: an unenlightened, homophobic school board. This pathetic quote from a Wilson County school board member pretty much says it all:
One Wilson school board member, who also is a school resource officer with the sheriff’s office, raised religious objections. “That’s not saying anything negative toward those people, that I’m any more valuable than they are,” school board member Greg Lasater said. “They’ve got a right to education just like the normal, the regular ‘John Doe’ kid out here would have.
“If I had to vote, just from my own Christian values — nothing against those folks — it would be hard for me as a board member to support it,” he said.
Yes, nothing against THOSE PEOPLE they’re just not NORMAL er, REGULAR, er, gah, YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN! Yes, Mr. Lasater, we do.
Here’s Director of Schools Mike Davis:
Davis said he doesn’t see how the proposed club would add value to the school. He also said he doesn’t want exclusive clubs. The Fellowship of Christian Athletes, for instance, is open to non-athletes, he said.
I wonder how many atheists or Jews are in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes? And who’s to say a hetero student couldn’t join a gay/lesbian support group, anyway? More to the point: if you haven’t read about our nation’s teens being bullied and tormented because of actual or perceived sexual orientation issues, then you aren’t plugged in enough to our youth. In which case: what the hell are you doing involved in our schools in the first place?
I hereby prescribe the entire last season of “Glee” to the Wilson County School Board. Perhaps knowing the show airs on Fox will help the medicine go down.
Southern Beale 
Anymore, when some jackass starts bloviating on about his ‘Christian values’, I reach for my gun…
Not really, I don’t have one, but I’m damn sick of their [total lack of] “christian values”.
The more these people talk the more idiotic they sound. I’m sure it’s no revelation but it seems clear there is a complete absence of any critical thinking on their part. They just take all their little “moral” dictates as unquestionable axioms.
“In which case: what the hell are you doing involved in our schools in the first place?”
Well, they’re just doing the Grover Norquist thing the hard way; killin’ gummint by sucking up all of its resources.
Sometimes I wish I had about 9 gay, hot, methhead biker kids, just so I could go to the PTA meetings and say, “What? You’re saying my child is “different”?”
Is it me or are we all living in the movie “Pleasantville”?
Not Pleasantville, I think, more like a small town in the fifties. Which as I remember, was anything but Pleasantville.
I attended a now-defunct military academy in high school. There was a big bust in 11th grade when a homosexual lieutenant was outed involving another student, cameras and much shouting in the middle of the night. Geeze. The poor man’s “reputation” was ruined and he left the next day.
It wasn’t Pleasantville by any stretch.
JW
Wasn’t “Pleasantville” the movie that starred Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaall about 2 kids from the modern world transported back into a 1950s television family a la Leave It Beaver and Father Knows Best? The film is all black and white and they have to be the perfect milk drinking teens who never rebel in the mythical white nuclear family? Until the Reese Witherspoon character starts introducing this world to sex and suddenly the film becomes color?
I thought that movie was called Pleasantville. Maybe I’m thinking of a different film. I know, Google is my friend … oy …
Thank you for posting this and supporting those kids who may not have the courage to speak up for themselves. Being a teenager is hard enough, being a teenager who falls outside the expected gender and sexual expressions can be disastrous.