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So it'd be okay for a white boy to express his opinion that all "******s" work as slaves, as long as he's not harassing a black person in specific, in a public school?
back to the kid, if he had of said "that call is so redneck, or retarded etc" the teacher would have suspended him, but the teacher sounds like a politness fascist, a PC autocrat, a touchy feely tolerance totalitarian, and i see this case having nothing to do with homophobia, instead it is all about institutional overreaction to childhood
as far as tolerance goes though, i think there are far better ways to engender tolerance other than though institutionalized force, which i think is highly counter productive, especially when it is used as a first responce
this thread has enlightened me some, i mean i realized that gay=lame was offensive to gay people, but i never realized how offensive it was. part of that is i come from an area with relatively few open homosexuals, while i have made gay aquaintances in the past, i haven't ever really been exposed to either gay culture first hand nor have I ever had a really close gay friend. it isn't that i have actively avoided befriending gays, there simply isn't any gays in my sphere of contact to befirend, plus i have only a handful of super close friends. i have had a few experiences recently (and no it wasn't any kind of sexual experimentation) that has really opened my eyes when it comes to gay marriage, and it has changed me from being ambivalent to being a wholehearted supporter of it. i think interaction, engagement, and hearing all sides of the issue is the best way to open people's eyes.
i can also see where the kid could be coming from. i went to a high school that had between 1000-1200 students. out of all of those students, in my freshman year there were no open homosexuals, no african americans, three or so palestinians, no jews, three indians, no native americans, two pakistanis, and possibly ten asian american students. the rest were white. there were far more redneck students than all of the minority students combined. at that point in my life i had yet to meet a homosexual, and gay=lame was far more common than gay=homosexual. very few people, especially in middle school, and high school discuessed any aspect of gay culture...except getting it on with bi chix lol
now with that in mind, an automatic suspension over say gay=lame, would have really brought a backlash, i mean the far majority of churches in this area still preach that homosexuality is a sin, and god doesn't hate the sinners but he hates the sin. many parents would have been offended at the schools protecting a nonexistant minority in the community who were involved in something quite taboo at the expense of a child.
on a sidenote when i first went to college, an upperclassman said he'd been to my town before with his highschool basketball team and said he had never been to a more racist place in his life.
the thing is unless you change kids now, and teach them both tolerance and that gay=lame is offense, in 20 years or so gay culture will need to find a new term because hetero kids will have altered the meaning of gay once again
and Mr. Fun, I can relate to being an outsider, to being picked on, being made fun of, loathing myself. I was a fatty kid, and they are probably even more shunned than gay kids in the majority of places.
ACK!
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