Essentially, a judge, ruled that Itawamba School District violated Constance McMillen's First Amendment rights by prohibiting her from attending the school's prom in a tuxedo with a female date. The judge did, however, deny the ACLU's request for an injunction that would force the district hold the prom. He rejected the injuction because a group of parents promised to hold a private, wholly inclusive prom.
This turned out to be a very ugly lie. The private, "inclusive" prom was a ruse intended to distract a group of "undesirables" while the parents held another party for the "acceptable" students. Only seven students attended the prom on the date announced by the school's attorney. As if the utter vileness of the parents and other students wasn't evident in their homophobic bigotry, there's this:
Two students with learning difficulties were among the seven people at the country club event, McMillen recalls. "They had the time of their lives," McMillen says. "That's the one good thing that come out of this, [these kids] didn't have to worry about people making fun of them [at their prom]."
The parents' deception was inhumanely cruel, no doubt, but what makes it so shocking is its personal nature. A great portion of right-wing, resentment-based politics (anti-welfare, anti-immigration...etc.) occurs at a distance. The gay marriage issue, for example, is framed as a conceptual disagreement about the institution. They say, "I just think marriage should be between a man and a woman," and do everything they can to ignore the real human suffering it causes.
And, in fact, these malicious positions are difficult to sustain when confronted with their very personal results. That's why this was so sickening.
The Mississippi case exposes parents willing to lie to ostracize certain elements of their community. And not their peers, not other adults they work with or professionally compete with, but high school kids. They focused all of their rancor on one young woman, and decided to take out a few others while they had the chance.
Targeting an individual in such a malicious manner reveals a complete vacuum of basic decency that is difficult to fathom. It's roughly the difference between the person sitting in Wyoming in 1965 arguing with his friends about the merits of segregation while being blissfully unaware of the policies actual impact, and the people in Alabama burning churches and forming lynch mobs. While both groups are advocatng similarly disgusting public policy, the ability to act very personally on such shallow bigotry defines another level of horrific human.
Perhaps these Mississippi parents should be applauded for their lack of hypocrisy. They don't simply advocate disgusting behavior at distance while happily allowing others to fight in the trenches, so to speak (see War, Iraq). No, they are the full, living embodiment of their despicable ideology.
Like the insanity surround Terry Schaivo's death, these fleeting moments when the true foundation of fundamentalism is exposed, help us understand what we're really dealing with. The opposition to gay rights in this country is not about "traditionalism" or some similarly detached concept, it is about honest-to-goodness hatred and bigotry.
