From what I know of Jesus (or Jesus mythology, whatever, honestly) - he probably would have gone to the outcast prom.  These people are even idiots at what they’re good at.

The ACLU needs to sue these fuckers into the Stone Age.

Oh wait, they’re already there…

But Constance sounds like she’s going to be just fine. Living well is the best revenge.

Truly and utterly disgusting. There aren’t words enough to describe how hateful this is.

Doesn’t surprise me.  This is the exact tactic used to keep southern proms segregated.  The official school prom is the “black” prom, and the white parents get together and host a private invitation-only event on the same night.

Ugh, I was so appalled and disgusted by this. How fucking cruel can people be…and all in the name of their religion. Well, I happen to know a few Christians who would be quite disturbed by this awful behavior. You know, because they’re not total assholes.

And seriously - whatever your religious beliefs and such, get the FUCK over it. We’re talking about two girls dancing together. OMG HOW SCARY. Lordy, grow up already.

This story is so upsetting, and it has all the aspects of the bullying behavior we discussed in earlier threads:

You had parents and students conspire to keep information from McMillen and exclude her and then basically trick her into showing up to an event which no one showed up to.

@Tyro, to be fair, learning disabled students aren’t “no one.”  I know that’s probably not what you meant, but still.

The right I think has interpreted the Jesus story differently than liberals have.  They think all the stuff Jesus said was just to get through Roman persecution, but once Christians took over Rome and everywhere else, all thos rules went out the window.

As long as Christianity exists, the right-wingers and the Christians in power will always act “non-Jesusly” and there is nothing liberals can do.  What is best for liberals is to let them have Christianity and we’ll embrace a truly tolerant religion or better, no religion.

They think all the stuff Jesus said was just to get through Roman persecution, but once Christians took over Rome and everywhere else, all those rules went out the window.

And that, I’m afraid, actually is pretty much what happened…

Creepy.

Wow.

Jesus Christ.  This is so awful I don’t know what to say.

So…inhuman. Petty. Mind-numbingly juvenile. And upsetting.

I find this attack on the poor girl unconscionable.  Who seriously thinks this is the appropriate action amongst human beings regardless of religion?  How do you walk around going “you know what, lets hold a secret prom to keep a lesbian girl from having a happy time”  because I have yet to work that one out.  It isn’t as if denying her the prom will make her become straight some how, in fact if they live in this small community they’re bound to see these two roaming the area and hopefully having open displays of affection. 

They don’t care about religion except when it lets me exclude people.  There are plenty of honest, good people, who have a religious side.  Just these people tend to shove their religion out there as a front to cover for their disgusting hateful thoughts.

This isn’t about religion; everyone here knows that most people do whatever they were going to do anyways.

This is about the South.

I don’t know if she feels this way, but I would parse it as “she went to the real prom.”  No matter how many people showed up, it was the official one.

The “private” prom the others went to?  Not real, not official, and definitely fucked up if they excluded certain people for bogus reasons.

Good point about the racially-segregated proms in the South, The Opoponax.

This isn’t about religion; everyone here knows that most people do whatever they were going to do anyways.

This is about the South.

Jesse Custer?  That you?

I think it goes rather without saying that this is seven different kinds of fucked up, as the seventeen previous comments no doubt…say.  That said, I skipped high school, and 90s pop culture combined with a personal preoccupation with the Columbine shootings have made the absence of any prom memories quite substantive in my mind.  My comment on posting the story about the lesbian prom picstravaganza was something to the effect of “Prom: one more thing lesbians can do that I missed out on.”

Well, shit.  Sorry lesbians, you’re back in the memory hole with jerks like me.

What a bunch of assholes.

My high school, y’all, my home town.* I won’t even bother trying with the whole “they’re not all like that” or “you’re not getting the whole picture”, because, frankly, it ain’t true. For all but a very, very few, the ones that aren’t active assholes - and the sneaky organization of a private prom surprises me not one tiny bit - are the type who think the worst evil is to rock the boat to any degree. These folks aren’t knuckle-dragging, sister-fucking rednecks with two teeth in the family who take tractors to work, mind. It is, for the most part, middle- to upper-middle-class, small-town-on-the-grow, junior leaguer types. They drive SUVs and vote Republican and follow Mississippi State/Ole Miss football like it was actually important and watch “American Idol” and go to church and skiing on the Tenn-Tom Waterway and fuck each other’s spouses and eat McDonald’s and try to stay awake in church and buy beer from Skyline while voting down any ordinances that’d allow alcohol sales and try to pretend nothing’s changed since, oh, 1969 or so. Very, very Babbit but with beer coozies and tanning beds.

The sad thing is, there was initially a lot of support for Constance outside the school system and certain “concerned parents”, mainly in the “who really gives a damn vein”? Perhaps there still is, I don’t know**, but again, I’m not at all surprised that the “concerned parents” pulled this shit nor that nobody really gives a damn about what is actually the right thing to do.

I go home to visit the kinfolk once or twice a year, and I’m always asked why I don’t move back home and why I insist on living in “weird” places like Athens and now New Orleans. “Y’all just don’t get it,” I say. “I don’t think you really want to get it.”

*Actually, I grew up in an unincorporated part of Itawamba County about 20 miles south-southwest of Fulton, near the Monroe County line. Dirt roads and well water, so the Fultonians considered us the rednecks. It is to laugh. I had to make a 40-mile round trip every school day for 18 years for the pleasure of their company.

**My source of information on goings on back home, my mother, has something against certain people involved with this, so the info is tainted. I won’t go into detail, but it has nothing to do with Constance’s sexuality. Momma’s firmly in the “what do I care” category.

Considering everything going for Constance, it wouldn’t surprise me that within 5-10 years…or even before that she starts receiving mailings from her high school’s alumni association asking for money. 

Acquaintances and friends who received similar crap treatment from classmates and/or teachers/admins in high school and university tended to achieve a measure of revenge not only by living well…but also by ignoring those pleadings for funds.  A few of them were even known to use the pre-paid return envelopes to send back civil letters stating the exact reasons why they won’t give….along with sending back the pleadings for funds in shredded format. 

Constance will be well within her rights to follow their examples.

Mind-numbingly juvenile.

I can almost—almost—forgive the kids involved, in time.  They’re teenagers, they’re stupid, they’re pleased with themselves right now but they’re going to look back on this in 10 years and be embarrassed at their own ignorance.

I can’t forgive the parents for aiding and abetting their kids in being so immature.  Hell, it was probably the parents’ idea, not the kids’, to pull this stunt.  That’s the really sad part.  You expect teenagers to do stupid, hurtful, immature things because they’re teenagers and they have to learn better.  You expect adults to act like motherfucking adults, not petty teenagers.

fuck fuckity fuck, with fucksauce on top.

this makes me fucking angry, I don’t know what to say!

Looks like Sherman razed the wrong fucking city in the South.  Fucking assholes.  Can I be on their death panels?

Yes, themann1086, eliminationist rhetoric is such a useful response.  For gawd’s sake, there’s enough crap here to comment on, without wishing death on a whole town.

If anyone needs some schadenfruede right now, you can watch one of the prom-goers get thoroughly pwnd on this thread.

http://lafiga.firedoglake.com/2010/04/05/the-meanest-town-in-america-fake-prom-for-lesbian-student/

She wants to be a journalist? LOL

Breathtaking. It’s like a whole town running a nationwide “WE SUCK” campaign.

Classy behaviour there. And I mean that deep-fried in sarcasm. Constance’s grace in responding to such cowardly spite makes her all the more admirable.

Is there somewhere we can donate to her college fund?

There’s another messed up thing here: who has a prom—fake or otherwise—on Good Friday? Was this a coordinated effort to say, “hey, while we’re conspiring to humiliate the lesbian, let’s take the opportunity to make sure there are no Catholics at our prom, as well” ?

Not only is that fucked up, that makes me wonder….

If she and six other students went to this prom, how many others were directed to it and just decided not to go?  Because if it was only those seven - why the fuck would you even bother excluding them?  It’s just seven people!  What, were there only like, twenty other people at the “real” prom?  And what difference would it make to have “learning disabled” people go to a different prom?  Seriously?

God, these people are assholes.  And then they start a FB with “Quit yer cryin’”?  Yeah, how about you stop being assholes first.

On an extremely petty note, those are some of the fugliest dresses I have ever seen.  The bad taste . . . it burns my eyes!

Katherine,

The death panel thing is a joke.  J-O-K-E.  Cause there are no death panels.  I might as well have wished to be able to drop frost bombs on them from my undead dragon.

I think the nuclear industry would be happy to hear that Fulton, MS is very willing to become what Yucca Mountain couldn’t be.  I say we get the word out to only eight families and then get the trucks full of high level sludge rolling.

Oh, and can we please archive all these hate pages?  I’m sure that more than a few college admissions officers would be interested in knowing about incoming students who are already complicit or actively involved in hate crimes.

Can I be on their death panels?

Only if you are willing to work for BC/BS of Mississippi.

No, we can’t send the stuff slatted for Yucca Mtn there; the environment is not suitable for long term storage of anything.  They are already no doubt suffering from the effects of improper disposal of hazardous waste (cancer alley anyone?).  Okay, so maybe no one would really notice right away, but do we really need MS envirnmental law laxness poisoning the GoM even more?

Yeah, that was mean.  Clearly not everyone there is a braindead bigot, just most people in this particular community with HS kids.

I’m surprised by how many small-minded teenagers that school had. Really? They didn’t want to rebel against the picayune hatred of their elders? Are they big on evangelical church teachings or something?

A couple weeks ago, I heard that Ellen DeGeneres presented Constance with a $30,000 scholarship funded by some corporation. Given her willingness to stand up for herself, I think Constance will go far in life.

I can almost—almost—forgive the kids involved, in time.  They’re teenagers, they’re stupid, they’re pleased with themselves right now but they’re going to look back on this in 10 years and be embarrassed at their own ignorance.

I can’t forgive the parents for aiding and abetting their kids in being so immature.  Hell, it was probably the parents’ idea, not the kids’, to pull this stunt.  That’s the really sad part.  You expect teenagers to do stupid, hurtful, immature things because they’re teenagers and they have to learn better.  You expect adults to act like motherfucking adults, not petty teenagers.

Mnemosyne,

Though I understand your sentiment, the willingness to forgive because “they’re teenagers” is such a cop-out and an indication of how “they’re kids” mentality has become a self-fulfilling prophesy as most teens realize how this allows them to get away with crappy immature behavior and act accordingly. 

Personally, I expect “teenagers”, especially those 17 and over to act as mature adults and not pull out the “we’re teenagers” BS.  It’s really sad that a sizable chunk of the graduating class are probably 1 or more years older than I and a number of classmates were when we started and/or finished our first year in college.  Heck, nearly all of them are older than one classmate with whom I’ve had several classes who graduated with the highest honors from our undergrad at 17.

@20 I feel that way about my old school, but I haven’t yet gotten around to returning the shredded request.  I’ve considered writing a letter explaining why I’ve enclosed a bill, to help pay for the therapy I’ve been using to train myself out of the trauma of attending in the first place.

Phil Ochs nailed it back in ‘64:
“Here’s to the schools of Mississippi
Where they’re teaching all the children that they don’t have to care
All of rudiments of hatred are present everywhere
And every single classroom is a factory of despair
There’s nobody learning such a foreign word as fair
Oh, here’s to the land you’ve torn out the heart of
Mississippi find yourself another country to be part of.”

Though I understand your sentiment, the willingness to forgive because “they’re teenagers” is such a cop-out and an indication of how “they’re kids” mentality has become a self-fulfilling prophesy as most teens realize how this allows them to get away with crappy immature behavior and act accordingly.

I’m sorry, but I just can’t blame this entire fiasco on the kids when it was the parents who aided and abetted them by letting their own childishness and pettiness run free.  Do you really think this would have happened without the assistance of the parents and that the teenagers would have been able to sign a contract for a venue, hire a band, arrange catering, etc. without adult assistance?

I’m not excusing the actions of the kids, and I’m a little disappointed you would claim I did.  I’m pointing out that, regardless of what the people you went to high school with did, it’s not unusual for teenagers to be immature and do things that they will regret later.  It is—or, rather, it should be—unusual for adults to act like teenagers, but at least some of them did.

A couple weeks ago, I heard that Ellen DeGeneres presented Constance with a $30,000 scholarship funded by some corporation.

Thanks for passing that info along. It makes my day.

Given her willingness to stand up for herself, I think Constance will go far in life.

Just look at her. (As well as noting her compassionate words about the learning-disabled kids.) I know an intelligent expression when I see one. Compare to the ovine faces of the mean girls.

You know what this reminds me of? The white working class girl who was Michelle Obama’s roommate in College, whose mother insisted she change roommates because it would be a waste of time/socially inappropriate to be stuck with the black girl at Princeton when you could be socially climbing with people who matter.  The girl wasn’t into being friends with Michelle because, although she didn’t know it at the time, she was wrestling with her own inability to fit in because she was a lesbian (but hadn’t come out to herself or others at the start of college). Meanwhile, Michelle went on to be the First Lady.  They interviewed the mother and the girl who had rejected Michelle Freshman year and they were kind of sorry about it all and how it had worked out.  When Constance and the other rejectees make it out of Itawamba and make something of themselves the girls at the upper class/fake prom will be all “how was I to know? I didn’t mean to hurt her feelings…”

aimai

Matt T. @ #19:  Exactly.  It’s the smug, mildly prosperous (but only by the low local standards; they couldn’t make it in a real city) ones who suck most in that culture, not the poorer whites.  I’ve only friended a few of HS classmates—and I’m from a somewhat more populous area in MS—on Facebook, and they kinda freak me out even though they’re not especially political, were relatively nice back in the day, and aren’t stupid at all.  That’s their world & they don’t see anything wrong with it even though it sucks wrt every quality-of-life measure… they have nice cars & newish houses & the internet keeps them from lagging too much wrt styles & now they don’t have to drive 100 miles to get to a strip mall, so why should anyone look down on them?- it’s the weirdos and the minorities and the too-high proportion of Others that drag the averages down, as far as they’re concerned.

Sigh… the truth is that getting away from the middle-class whites was my biggest incentive to leave Mississippi.  The real hicks kinda scared me and I was certainly aware of racial issues, but the ‘normal’ people were the oppressive, vicious ones deep down.  Nothing like self-satisfied conformity to reveal essentially weak characters, IMNSHO.

I’m sorry, but I just can’t blame this entire fiasco on the kids when it was the parents who aided and abetted them by letting their own childishness and pettiness run free.  Do you really think this would have happened without the assistance of the parents and that the teenagers would have been able to sign a contract for a venue, hire a band, arrange catering, etc. without adult assistance?

Considering how many high school seniors are 18+ by the second semester, it wouldn’t be surprising that some who are of age would be able to sign a binding contract for a venue, hire a band, arrange catering on their own.  Only assistance from the parents would be to provide the funding. 

The above was commonly done by high school classmates in arranging/coordinating high school/college club outings/road trips….and they often did it with little/no parental assistance even in the funding department because their parents aren’t interested, didn’t have the financial means, and/or were recent immigrants with language/institutional cultural barriers to deal with.  The funding came from the school’s club funding after negotiations/coordinating with the school admins/teachers/alumni organization. 

I’m not excusing the actions of the kids, and I’m a little disappointed you would claim I did.  I’m pointing out that, regardless of what the people you went to high school with did, it’s not unusual for teenagers to be immature and do things that they will regret later.  It is—or, rather, it should be—unusual for adults to act like teenagers, but at least some of them did.

I’m getting that impression from the quote:

They’re teenagers, they’re stupid, they’re pleased with themselves right now but they’re going to look back on this in 10 years and be embarrassed at their own ignorance.

Though “teenagers” on average tend to have far less life experience than most adults, they’re far from stupid.  One reason why teenagers are so “immature” in their behaviors is not necessarily because of their age, but because they realize that US society, especially since the 1950’s still views them more like children who don’t know better and thus, they can use that perception to get away with it. 

After all, they’re just “stupid” “immature” kids/adolescents/teens…

Fascism or right-wing extremism in general is mostly a middle class phenomena, and where it isn’t it’s mostly championned by declasse elements, by which I mean currently lower class folks with internalized middle class values, most of the time because they used to either personally hold an higher status in the past, or their parents or grandparents did, but sometimes just because of the simple fact that bourgeois values tend to have an hegemony in a society so it will ‘colonize’ the minds even of some of the people on the lower tiers. Take the phenomena of ‘white privilege’ in underprivileged white working class folks for instance. It’s often as much about their actual, existing privilege as the imagined privileges these people think are ‘their due’.

You take the Nazi party, Al Quaida, the Republicans, etc. Their strange combination of elitism and populism can only exist because they are:
a) in a slightly better position than most of their countrymen and women BUT
b) an embattled community whose position is slipping (either objectively because of capitalism depradation over the middle class which is itself caused by the true elite elements in both the GOP and Democratic party, or subjectively because the poor are ‘rising up’ to the same level as they are).

I’m not surprised that the local ‘ruling party’ of respectable middle class Christian families is responsible. Contrary to a lot of stereotypes on the Left, that’s the basic constituency of the far right, if only because their conformism blinds them to slippage from mere conservativism to proto- or full blown fascism. Even where ‘hicks’ are concerned, you’ll find that many of them are from rural areas where familial income is based on farming… which means many are only a few generations away from a functionning family farm, which is a form of ‘middle class’ privilege because a farmer owns property, contrary to proletarian laborers.

“It’s not that they wouldn’t ask me to the prom. It’s that they wouldn’t tell me where it was.”

All of a sudden, that joke by Rita Rudner doesn’t seem so funny.

I can almost—almost—forgive the kids involved, in time.  They’re teenagers, they’re stupid, they’re pleased with themselves right now but they’re going to look back on this in 10 years and be embarrassed at their own ignorance.

I can’t forgive the parents for aiding and abetting their kids in being so immature.  Hell, it was probably the parents’ idea, not the kids’, to pull this stunt.  That’s the really sad part.  You expect teenagers to do stupid, hurtful, immature things because they’re teenagers and they have to learn better.  You expect adults to act like motherfucking adults, not petty teenagers.
Comment #21: Mnemosyne on 04/06 at 01:05 AM

And for once, I can applaud the facebook is forever facility.  This homophobic attitude is now on record - and I hope there is enough human instinct for fairness to see that it makes it’s way to a lot of employers, institutions etc, where these students may later seek membership or employment.  What employer would want say, a manager or human resources personnel with such clear, documented homophobic and anti-disabled persons not only attitudes but actions on their payroll - opens them up to a host of lawsuits.

Contrary to a lot of stereotypes on the Left, that’s the basic constituency of the far right, if only because their conformism blinds them to slippage from mere conservativism to proto- or full blown fascism.

Hence the under-reported fact that the teabaggers overwhelmingly are not down-and-out types but “respectable” college-“educated” members in good standing of the middle class.

Fascism or right-wing extremism in general is mostly a middle class phenomena,

Except that it doesn’t make sense in the context of hostility to gays: there’s no aspect of economic competition here. There’s no sort of divide-and-conquer aspect of exploiting racial divisions among people of the same social class.

I mean, granted, the small town elite are perhaps the most strident about their conservatism, but I don’t see how it fits into the anti-gay thing, except as a general small town/southern attitude that demands that everyone “know their place.”

Hey, question - can the judge issue something on this - like a contempt of court ruling?  He didn’t make the school reinstate the prom only because the parents had a private prom already in the works, and judge thought that would be OK.  I thought his view was compassionate - deposits had been made on venue, etc.  Now, normally a private party is a private party because you get to invite who you like, but this particular private party was part of a court ruling, which means these actions violate the terms of the resolution. 

Any real lawyers to help out this armchair attorney?

I know I am REALLY late on this one, but will someone please ask their patron saint, Sarah Palin, what she thinks of the disabled kids being excluded from prom? She’s always going around saying how we should treat kids with disabilities just like other kids (the one thing I agree with that hare brain on). What does she have to say about this? I’m curious.

Anything else I have to say about this disgraceful behavior would just be a profanity laced tirade so I’ll stop.

But I do have to say one more thing. As a black woman, I see the black girl in those photos and I want to slap the taste out of her mouth! I can’t help it. I wonder if she has any idea what Ernest Green or Autherine Lucy did for her, and why she should not be on the side of the discriminators.

Orange - Hurrah! I am so glad to hear that and hope Ms McMillen finds success in her studies and many friends as genuine and brave as she is.

theman1086,

We know that you were attempting to make a joke.  It’s still unnecessary and inappropriate.  When someone points out a mistake you’ve made, the correct response is self-reflection, rather than become defensive.  You don’t have to agree with that person, but you do need to think more deeply about it, and realize that there may be some point that you have not yet considered.  FWIW, we’ve heard it’s just a joke more times than we can count, and it’s not a good excuse.  You will not succeed in convincing many of us that that excuse makes everything better.  We’re not stupid; we know you were joking.  You have missed the point.

I know I am REALLY late on this one, but will someone please ask their patron saint, Sarah Palin, what she thinks of the disabled kids being excluded from prom? She’s always going around saying how we should treat kids with disabilities just like other kids (the one thing I agree with that hare brain on). What does she have to say about this? I’m curious.

The only reason Palin cares about special needs children is because she has one.  If she didn’t face it directly, she would not care about this issue at all.  I don’t think we should give her a cookie for caring about something that affects her, when she would never have given it a second thought otherwise.  She’s just as selfish as other bigots.

Considering how many high school seniors are 18+ by the second semester, it wouldn’t be surprising that some who are of age would be able to sign a binding contract for a venue, hire a band, arrange catering on their own.  Only assistance from the parents would be to provide the funding.

And yet that’s not what happened.  The parents rented the venue, paid for it, and chaperoned the prom.

Still want to give the parents a free pass and blame only the kids?

For Matt T @ 19:

The Respectable Class

In a very important sense the respectable class is the dangerous class in the community. By its example it degrades the social conception of the meaning of life, and thus materializes, vulgarizes, and brutalizes the public thought. Also, by its indifference to public duties, it constitutes itself the guilty accomplice of all the enemies of society. By this same indifference, too, it becomes the great breeder of social enemies; for only where the carcass is are the vultures gathered together. The ease with which self-styled good people ignore public duties and become criminal accomplices in the worst crimes against humanity is one of the humorous features of our ethical life.

In the application of principles to life there will long be a neutral frontier on the borders of the moral life, where consequences and tendencies have not so clearly declared themselves as to exclude differences of opinion among men of good will. Here men will differ in judgment rather than in morals. It is very common to exaggerate this difference into a moral one; and then the humorous spectacle is presented of friends who ignore the common enemy and waste their strength in mutual belaborings. This is one of the great obstacles to any valuable reform.

from The Principles of Ethics, by Borden Parker Bowne

I read about this here and on Pam’s site this am and I still can’t get my head around it.  it’s so vile, hateful, petty, childish, irrational…..

Asshole parents raising their asshole teenagers to be the asshole parents of the next generation. Generations grown up choked on their parents’ spite, regurgitating it for their own kids. Plenty of blame to go around for all of them.

@Tyro: I think hostility to gays is mostly an accidental feature of fascist thought than an essential part of it. Fascism, and the far right in general, is a cult to the mythology of a warrior masculinity coupled with nurturing feminity. Class interest is equivocated with national interest (hence why all the rural middle class Christians are termed ‘Real Americans’ by people like Beck) and in a worldview where the history of the world is the war of nation against nation, the only purpose of society is the production of more and more warriors to defend a given culture. Again, one attack on liberalism from the conservative/far right mindset is on its cosmopolitanism… the idea is that it is suspect because it is rootless and not tied to the land/the country, therefore it is at best treasonous by omitting to give enough support to the fatherland, at worst it is actively treasonous, but the two forms of ‘treason’ are equivocated in their mythology (this is the origin of the ‘liberal dhimmitude’ myth).

In warrior culture, men’s duty is to die for their country and women’s duty is to produce more men so they can die for their country (also, more women to perpetuate reproduction duties, but that’s a secondary goal). The more rigid these gender roles are, the more efficient society is at this task of producing more little soldiers to win the war of all (nations) against all (nations). Gays, lesbians, transexuals, gender queers, etc… by their very existence propose alternate models to these rigid gender roles. This makes them suspect.

Now I’ve already seen gay men on the right trying to align with Men’s Rights and redefine the current mythos from ‘homosexual’ to ‘men lovers’ as an attempt to cozy up to the warrior culture (“We’re not subverting masculinity, we’re actually ultra-masculine! We love masculinity so much we have sex with it!”). I’ve already sent a link to Amanda about an interview with one such ‘luminary’ a million years back but she probably gets infinite emails so I never saw her put up an opinion about it on the blog.

I’m not sure if they’ll ever be successful, but if they’re not I believe it’s more to do with the mythological underpinning of the rational (read: economic) basis for American fascism into Christianity than an essential part of ur-Fascism. In the proper historical conditions, gay men might well be part of a vanguard of the far right (I think lesbians will still be out of luck though, because they’re women, and warrior masculinity cults will still have an issue with it). Not that this should be seen as a good thing, mind you. It just means there’s a potential weak link there in the alliance between feminists and GBLT that could be exploited if the far right, for a second, decided to act rationally instead of blindly following their mythological/ideological rationalization for their position.

In the proper historical conditions, gay men might well be part of a vanguard of the far right

cough “Ernst Röhm” cough

Hence the under-reported fact that the teabaggers overwhelmingly are not down-and-out types but “respectable” college-“educated” members in good standing of the middle class.

Actually without me going out there and handing out questionnaires which I would be shot for, I doubt more than 20-30% have a college education.  Most of those would be the small business owners and few professionals who side with them.  The rest have better-salaried positions in trades & business.  Most small businesses are services or trades (in opposition to the merchant ideal we all hold), so the teabagger is more likely better off than most college graduates due to their ability to hold a company together long enough to capitalize on the venture, not because they’re educated.

As for people trying to not blame the kids, I wouldn’t be surprised if the kids started the whole issue.  This isn’t elementary school, this is high school.  Parents no matter how involved aren’t going to know the goings on in a high school unless kids talk.  These kids set out with a goal of snubbing Constance and getting themselves a “better” party so it became a two-fold plan I am sure to use their fascist parents to get what they want.  I do hope when these morons roll off to college they get the rude awakening of how professors never bend to some middle-class whites will.

As for elimination rhetoric, at some point you reach a frustration limit.  As people what do you do with a group like this?  They’re skirting federal laws on civil rights, they’re throwing society’s ideals down a well and they’re proud of it.  They aren’t elected officials, you can’t vote them back into the dark.  I can understand the desire to be rid of them as a whole and be done with it.  But I can also see where it solves nothing because you’re just as bad as they are then.

And yet that’s not what happened.  The parents rented the venue, paid for it, and chaperoned the prom.

Still want to give the parents a free pass and blame only the kids?
Comment #57: Mnemosyne on 04/06 at 11:35 AM

Neither gets a free pass.  But all it would have taken is one kid anonymously giving Constance the correct venue to f-up the plans of the bigorents and their spawn.  Wouldn’t have even taken much in the “guts” department.

Actually without me going out there and handing out questionnaires which I would be shot for, I doubt more than 20-30% have a college education.

Been done (in a way) and you’re way off base. Only 35% have no college. http://www.gallup.com/poll/127181/Tea-Partiers-Fairly-Mainstream-Demographics.aspx

Sadly, we live in a country full of “educated” cretins.

When a tornado hits the community and rips down just about everything there, will these jerks blame Constance?  Or themselves?

Pretty sad dude, let her be and let her live her own life doing what makes HER happy!

Lou
www.anon-resources.at.tc

I’m going to go with homophobia as an integral part of fascism because of the whole homoerotic thing about Warriors bonding with each other and women being icky, erm the nurturing bedrock of society who must be protected from the public sphere. When your closet is that big you pretty much have to hate anyone who might open the door.

(And let’s remember, the christianists go on and on about the evil hotness of gay sex and how even a breath of it will turn the straightest arrow into a limpwristed Tom of Finland, which is to say too manly to be allowed to exist. They’re sort of forced into a closeted homosexuality by their hatred of open sexual pleasure in general. They can’t really demonize heterosexuality per se, so gay sex becomes the proxy for their crazy fears.)

Hey guess what!  LIFE ISN’T FAIR.  Everyone is jumping to this girls defense, but this wasn’t a school prom it was put on by the parents…so it’s private.  Why isn’t everyone yelling at her for ruining the entire rest of the schools prom?  She fucked it up for everyone.  I started reading these comments and got sick after the first few.  She needs to learn that just because you’re gay doesn’t mean you get your way 100% of the time.

That being said the school was wrong to not let her go, and they were even more wrong to cancel the whole thing.

This also wasn’t a surprise because I read about it a few weeks ago.  It was planned, she knew it was going to happen, but it’s better press if she plays the “I didn’t know” card.

Fuck her and fuck anyone who thinks because they are different they deserve special attention.

Neither gets a free pass.  But all it would have taken is one kid anonymously giving Constance the correct venue to f-up the plans of the bigorents and their spawn.  Wouldn’t have even taken much in the “guts” department.

Exactly.  I was focusing on the kids because the “oh, they’re just stupid teens/kids” excuse has been overused…especially within the last few decades to infantilize and effectively absolve teens and even young adults of the responsibility for their actions.  I’m sorry, but those teens bear at least as much…and possibly more of the share of the responsibility than their parents considering they are on the cusp of adulthood. 

This sort of infantilizing of teens and even young adults is probably one critical factor in why I had to contend with college classmates 2-5 years older than me who were far more immature and childish than what would have been tolerated at my high school…...or just growing up in NYC period unless one is an excessively sheltered member of the privileged upper-east side set. 

The best lesson for these teens to learn is to find how their public childish and malicious behavior will result in life-long negative ramifications…such as rescinding of college admissions and/or great employment opportunities down the line. 

Colleges and workplaces have no need for such human rubbish…

Hey guess what!  LIFE ISN’T FAIR.  Everyone is jumping to this girls defense, but this wasn’t a school prom it was put on by the parents…so it’s private.  Why isn’t everyone yelling at her for ruining the entire rest of the schools prom?  She fucked it up for everyone.  I started reading these comments and got sick after the first few.  She needs to learn that just because you’re gay doesn’t mean you get your way 100% of the time.

That being said the school was wrong to not let her go, and they were even more wrong to cancel the whole thing.

This also wasn’t a surprise because I read about it a few weeks ago.  It was planned, she knew it was going to happen, but it’s better press if she plays the “I didn’t know” card.

Fuck her and fuck anyone who thinks because they are different they deserve special attention.

If the above is an issue….why so hot under the collar when we’re calling you on your/the teens’/parents’ demonstrated bigotry??? Why should a school, its young bigots, and its associated supporters so damned special as to be exempted from public criticism??

re: getoverit!
I believe I speak for decent people when I say: Fuck you too, very much.

What the hell is wrong with you, getoverit? You are a defective human being.

She ruined it for no one, sweetheart.  The school ruined it, blamed Constance, and like good little morons you guys did exactly what the school wanted you to do, which was exclude and bully her.

People like getoverit and the bigots of that school are exactly who Green Day was referring to in this song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GU4Vdvi_yE

How would Constance have ruined anything? She just wanted to go to the prom with her date, the same as all the rest of you. She didn’t try to keep anyone out or ruin anyone’s experience.

Getoverit sounds like one of the commenters (softballgirl10, I think) over at firedoglake.  And you know what?  They both sound like that mean girl in every class who, when called on bullying, gives you a blank look and says “we don’t have problems with cliques at this school.  I mean, like, some girls just don’t hang out with us but whatever, right?  Maybe they just need to learn that everything’s not about them, and stuff,” all while making life hell for everyone who isn’t a slightly less fabulous carbon copy of them.

What an incredibly hateful way to live.

For what it’s worth, that Facebook page has been FLOODED with support for Constance, and the supporters have clearly outnumbered the haters. It’s fun to read it for a while, refresh, and see how many more people have voiced their support.

There is one guy, though, Walter Carlton, who’s posting homophobic and racist comments. I’m reporting any comment that includes an F- or N- slur, and I encourage you guys to do the same—maybe we can get him kicked off Facebook!

Someone also posted this photo, which I like a lot. http://photos-b.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc3/hs468.snc3/25703_414788971258_600736258_5629281_7554490_s.jpg

It would be a nice gesture if other High Schools in the Country invited Constance to their proms. There are going to be plenty in May & June (& why the heck were these people having a prom in April?).

Maybe we could start a fund for Constance to attend some really NICE proms, with open minded, civilized kids?

In the proper historical conditions, gay men might well be part of a vanguard of the far right (I think lesbians will still be out of luck though, because they’re women, and warrior masculinity cults will still have an issue with it).

I think the far right would be OK with lesbians if they were limited only to a “super-mom” role.  “Hey, these lesbians aren’t that bad afterall since they keep producing/raising more people to die for the Fatherland!”

Kwillow

Maybe we could start a fund for Constance to attend some really NICE proms, with open minded, civilized kids?

So the disabled people who were also there are ignorant dickheads?

Really, all this rallying around Constance while the disabled students are just left faceless and nameless just kind of rubs me the wrong way.

Though I understand your sentiment, the willingness to forgive because “they’re teenagers” is such a cop-out and an indication of how “they’re kids” mentality has become a self-fulfilling prophesy as most teens realize how this allows them to get away with crappy immature behavior and act accordingly.

I think the point is more that, as teenagers, these kids probably don’t have a whole lot of life experience under their belts.  They’re sheltered in a lot of ways by the very parents and authority structure that engineered this, and without any exposure to the outside world it’s hard for them to develop their own moral standards. 

Maybe it’s a southern thing?  As someone who grew up not far from Fulton, in a town much like the one Matt T. describes, I did a thought experiment and put myself into the shoes of one of the teenage bystanders. 

Of course, in my conservative authority-worshipping southern town, I was the shit starter the other parents were “concerned” about.  And the gay kids who wanted to come out, wanted to have partners just like other teenagers got to, wanted to go to prom and dress their own way, and all that - those were my best friends.  So I’m safe, I’d have made the right choice even at 15.

But I can think of a lot of very good, principled, moral people I grew up with who would have rationalized to themselves that it was OK to stand by and watch this happen, or that it was OK to attend the private prom.  Hell, I know good, principled, moral people who attended the invitation-only cotillions held to keep their high school proms segregated, who never would have dreamed of rocking the boat by going to “the black prom”.  And I know that they did so because they didn’t know any better.  They were working with the toxic garbage they’d been fed their whole lives by their communities. 

And, leaving those insipid southern towns as adults, most of them have gotten a clue.  As adults, they’d never stand for the shit they stood for in high school.  Most of them are probably declaring the situation in Fulton an outrage, and rationalizing to themselves that they’d have NEVER gone to that invitation-only prom, NEVER have stood for the shit these guys in Fulton are standing for.  And I’m not sure that any of the above makes them bad people.  I’m certainly not sure we can apply the Nuremburg metric to people who are ultimately still children (in community status, if not biologically).

When a tornado hits the community and rips down just about everything there, will these jerks blame Constance?  Or themselves?

Pat Robertson will blame the townspeople for harboring a lesbian and not being mean enough to her.

I have heard the excuses for not inviting Constance to the “private prom” because of the “drama”, which, coming from a small town does not surprise me in the least. The idea that if you’re comfortable than anyone who points out the imperfections or injustices is a troublemaker.  But I have not heard any explanation for why the learning disabled kids were not invited.  That is some serious assholery.

I love that the person declaring that “Life Isn’t Fair!” are bemoaning how unfair it was that their prom was canceled.  Oh the woes of the oppressed white Christian majority.

Why isn’t everyone yelling at her for ruining the entire rest of the schools prom?

Because she didn’t ruin anyone’s. They ruined hers.

She needs to learn that just because you’re gay doesn’t mean you get your way 100% of the time.

You need to learn that just because you’re gay doesn’t mean other people get their way with you 100% of the time.

Fuck her and fuck anyone who thinks because they are different they deserve special attention.

I don’t think you meant the first part, but I quite agree with you on the second. Fuck those students who think that because they hate gays, they deserve special attention and a special private prom.

I gotta agree with Opoponax on this one—I don’t blame the teenagers nearly as much as the parents. It’s one thing to be a teenager who is, by default and training, ignorant and weak-willed and insecure to the point of hatefulness, and it’s another to be an adult who’s had every chance in the world not to be that way but who chooses to be anyways just out of spite. Would I love to smack a few of those kids pretty good? Naturally. But I also think that the old “folly of youth” thing has more than a grain of truth. They are, is not good people, at least redeemable in my opinion.

Also, to change tack a bit—where’s the disapproval for the boys in this equation? I’ve seen plenty of “mean girl” rhetoric, and a fair amount of gender-neutral criticism, but I haven’t seen the behavior of the *boyfriends* of all these asshole girls called into question specifically. They have more social power than the girls in this situation, I imagine; they aren’t going to be automatically called “dykes” like any girl who opened her mouth would. (Not that they wouldn’t get flack, but they are in a much stronger position than the female students, I believe.)