Thursday, June 19, 2008

We're taking our ball and going home, gay boy!

When I lived in Utah, some kids decided to make a "Gay and Lesbian Alliance Club" or something like that. The idea - through my dim memory - was for gay teenagers to have a place to share common experiences, common problems with being a gay teen in a very conservative state. My personal bet is they didn't plan on just having crazy sex orgies all the time.

Based on the way the school distract acted, though, you'd think that was exactly what was going on. The club was banned from the school. The kids took the school to court - and won. Courts basically said "You can't not let these kids have a club just because you don't like the subject matter. As long as they don't violate decency policies - aka, have orgies or go into graphic descriptions of sexual stuff - you really can't stop them from having a club, if you offer students a chance to have their own clubs."

State of Utah's decision? Ban *all* clubs. Chess club, drama club, every single one of them. Gone. Their reasoning was "Well, if we have to offer equal rights to the gay kids, then we'll deny clubs to *all* kids, and then we're being equal!"

Yeah, a pretty childish (pun intended) decision, but that's how it goes. I'm not sure what ever happened - I've since moved, but I'd like to think that someplace, somewhere, some kid can get his buddies together at school to play some fracking chess.

It's funny how this seems to be the default response now to things homosexual by conservatives. Three counties in California, now faced with the knowledge that they have to issue marriage licenses to consenting adults even if they're the same gender, have opted to not offer marriage licenses at all.

Yeah, that'll show you, gay people! We're going to honor marriage by not allowing *anybody* to get married - so people will just have to either live together and have kids and families without getting married, or we'll die as a species because everyone knows if you have sex without getting married your kids turn into mutants - or worse, Democrats!

(Sigh.)

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