Mississippi School Cuts Gay Student Photo from Yearbook

[kpete]

School Cuts Gay Student Photo from Yearbook

Courtesy ACLU
Wesson Attendance Center student Ceara Sturgis, who is gay, learned on Friday that school officials did not place her in the 2010 yearbook.

by Adam Lynch

When Veronica Rodriguez opened Wesson Attendance Center's Yearbook on Friday, she didn't find a trace of her lesbian daughter Ceara Sturgis after a long battle with school officials to include a photo of her daughter wearing a tuxedo in the school's 2010 yearbook.

"They didn't even put her name in it," Sturgis' mother Veronica Rodriguez said. "I was so furious when she told me about it. Ceara started crying and I told her to suck it up. Is that not pathetic for them to do that? Yet again, they have crapped on her and made her feel alienated."

Sturgis and her mother commissioned the Mississippi ACLU to protest officials' October 2009 decision not to allow Sturgis' photo to appear in the senior yearbook because she chose to wear a tuxedo instead of a dress.

The ACLU wrote an October letter demanding officials use Sturgis' submitted photo in the yearbook, but Copiah County School District officials refused. Rodriguez said she expected the yearbook to at least contain a reference to her daughter on the senior page. What she discovered on Friday, when the yearbook came in, was that the school had refused to acknowledge her entirely.

more:
http://www.jacksonfreepress.com/index.php/site/comments/school_cuts_gay_student_photo_from_yearbook/

[RKP5637]

1. Bigoted ignorant people. n/t

[begin_within]

2. Thereby recording their bigotry for posterity

It will be remembered as the "yearbook that they cut the gay guy out of" and thus will be an eternal reminder of their narrow-mindedness. If they had just done nothing, it would have passed by and then been forgotten.

[saras]

7. Right on

Seriously - does ANYONE EVER look at anyone else in old yearbooks beside their own friends? Do they remember who's in them and who isn't?

But they remember a news story like this for as long as the issue exists - let this show up in a couple of books and the story could live as long as the people in it, with thousands of university students being forced to report on it.

So they got to hurt her and her family again, in exchange for decades of large-scale public shame and humiliation. Apparently, according to their values, this is a good deal.

[saltpoint]

3. "We the People..." is how the Preamble kicks off. By that I'm assuming

that means all the people.

It ought to, in any case, and clearly doesn't in Copiah County, Mississippi.

[fishwax]

4. pathetic bigots

x(

[conscious evolution]

5. Kicking for exposure

[Obamanaut]

6. More discussion at this earlier thread

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=8227843

[Enthusiast]

8. Ignorant and bigoted is no

way to approach life. But this appears to be a common condition in Mississippi.