North Florida: where intolerance is a way of life

Last year, it was Okeechobee County that wanted to ban the Gay-Straight Alliance from its high schools. Now, it's Nassau County, north of Jacksonville, and as they did down south, the students are fighting back.

Yulee High School has refused to permit a Gay-Straight Alliance, and the ACLU has stepped in to sue the Nassau County School Board. Predictably, the Board's excuse is lame, doing little to mask the obvious intolerance they have for alternative lifestyles or the acceptance thereof.

A School Board attorney argued to U.S. District Judge Henry Adams that allowing an extracurricular club with a sexual orientation in the name would be counter to the district's abstinence-only policy and could be disruptive because of the passions the issue raises.

But a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union said the board's denial violated the students' First Amendment rights. He said the one meeting the alliance held in October before it was shut down didn't create a disturbance.

Adams said he would rule quickly on the request for a temporary injunction but didn't give a date. He told School Board attorney Frank Sheppard he had 72 hours to respond in writing to one of the students' arguments.

The judge wondered aloud during the hearing if a Gay-Straight Alliance wouldn't help ease school day disruption because of its stated goals of increasing tolerance and awareness and reducing bullying and harassment.

"Is it the School Board's policy that all gay children should stay in the closet?" Adams asked Sheppard.

The lawyer replied that the board believes students struggling with their sexual identity should consult parents, counselors, clergy and other adults.

In other words: don't let those dirty gays get together, because they might get some of those gay cooties on our God-fearing normal children.

Can someone explain to me why it's perfectly okay, in the opinions of many, to have organized prayer in schools (in violation of the U.S. Constitution), but not for a group advocating tolerance of difference perspectives to be in those same schools?

But what really chafes me is the explanation the School Board gives for its decision: the name of the organization -- the "Gay-Straight Alliance" -- somehow threatens the district's (medieval) abstinence-only sex education curriculum. Set aside for a moment the obvious and statistically provable point that abstinence-only sex ed doesn't work -- the problem here is that, like so many other institutions before it, the Board is confusing sexual activity with sexual orientation.

Look, folks, it's really not that hard to figure out: the words "gay" and "straight," in this context, have nothing to do with sexual activity. Rather, they refer to sexual orientation. As archaic as your asinine abstinence-only policy is, Nassau County, the existence of a Gay-Straight Alliance does nothing -- NOTHING!! -- that would contradict that policy. The U.S. military did the same thing years ago when it summarily banned gays from service (before "don't ask, don't tell"), conflating sexual activity (sodomy is and was illegal under the Uniform Code of Military Justice) with one's status. The bottom line: as a matter of legal principle, just because one is gay does not mean one necessarily will engage in impermissible sexual behavior. That's an argument against the military's stance, and it works equally well against Nassau County here.

The Board really ought to call their decision what it really is -- bigotry, plain and simple -- and be done with it. At least then they'd be intellectually honest. But, no, they have to come up with some half-assed explanation that doesn't stand up to the most cursory inquiry. Yet, that's the way most bigotry and discrimination is, isn't it? No rational reason -- just hatred.

Welcome to north Florida: proudly intolerant since 1845.