March 01, 2007
When a few classmates razzed Rebekah Rice about her Mormon upbringing with questions such as, "Do you have 10 moms?" she shot back: "That's so gay."Those three words landed the high school freshman in the principal's office and resulted in a lawsuit that raises this question: When do playground insults used every day all over America cross the line into hate speech that must be stamped out?
After Rice got a warning and a notation in her file, her parents sued, claiming officials at Santa Rosa's Maria Carillo High violated their daughter's First Amendment rights when they disciplined her for uttering a phrase "which enjoys widespread currency in youth culture," according to court documents.
Personally, I ban the phrase in my classroom as inappropriate, so I have no problem with the school attempting to drive a stake through its heart. But I think they missed the bigger issue.
Here we have a girl being harassed over her religion by classmates, who finally responds with a phrase that anyone who works with teens would know is relatively innocuous, yet it is the victim of the harassment who was punished. What action was taken against the religiously insensitive and intolerant classmates? Were they disciplined? It does not appear that way.
But then again, as we have seen in recent AP articles and among certain partisans out to trash a particular candidate for the GOP nomination, anti-Mormon prejudice and bigotry are still acceptable in some quarters.
Posted by: Greg at
09:19 AM
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When I was working as a police officer for the City of Houston, I regularly had to remove anti Mormon pamphlets and literature from the windshield of my truck, all of which were intended to "save me" from a fate worse than death. I had to wonder what kind of American citizen would have the nerve to step over that fine line between being concerned over another's welfare, either temporal, mental, or spiritual and impose and harrass, make light of and impune that other person's belief and or lifestyle.
I would hope that the school involved takes the time to figure out how to improve; it would appear that they have some poorly thought out forms of social engineering or crisis management skills.
Posted by: T F Stern at Thu Mar 1 10:13:46 2007 (z1IoH)
So is it tolerant to tease Mormons but not tolerant to call someone gay even when the slur had nothing to do with actually being gay. Go figure that one out. There may or may not be an agenda at work here but I seriously doubt tolerance has anything to do with it. At least not on a consistent basis.
Posted by: tkc at Mon Mar 5 10:55:34 2007 (kCA5q)
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