Same old song and dance

So, by now I'm sure you've all heard the story about the fake prom that was held in Mississippi. After Constance McMillen, a senior at the Itawamba County High School, wanted to bring her girlfriend to the prom, the school cancelled the prom altogether. She later was invited to a private prom with her girlfriend...and discovered that there were less than 10 students there (and some of those students had learning disabilities). The rest of the school went to a prom that was held in secret by the parents, and that the 10 students at the "fake prom" were not invited to.



The story's gone viral all over the blog community, and for good reason. Most people seem to get it for what it is--a really blatant and incredibly ugly display of discrimination. What really bothers me especially is that this fake prom was created to keep all the people who didn't fit in with the school's desired image out, like a way to remove anyone they didn't see as "worthy." (The original prom was cancelled on the grounds that a same-sex couple would be "distracting and disruptive"--but with a couple hundred kids at a prom, who's really going to be distracted by one couple??) Which is just so disgusting.



People may say that we as a nation may have come far, but in matters of civil rights, we still have a long way to go. As most of you know, I identify as mostly hetero (I use the term mostly because I don't think that anyone is exclusively one orientation or another but that we all fall into a continuum of sorts, like the Kinsey scale), but I am a HUGE ally. That's because I think freedom means freedom for everybody, not just a few.

And I am a huge history buff, especially with the history of social movements. What I have noticed, though, is that many of the same old excuses and the same old hate just keeps getting recycled. It's the same old prejudice, just in different hands. Think about how, as recently as the early twentieth century, interracial relationships were considered societally unacceptable. Many of you would find that archaic, and rightly so. Some states even had "racial integrity acts" (don't believe me? google it) that CRIMINALIZED an interracial marriage or relationsip on the grounds that it would lead to problems with the couple's children and later on, the entire human race. It wasn't until the 1960s, in a case called Loving Vs. Virginia that such laws were struck down once and for all. That's less than fifty years ago! Now imagine some of the opposition to marriage equality. A lot of folks who don't support same-sex marriage use the grounds that it will be harmful to their kids, and later on, to the entire human race. Same old excuses. (Although I know a LOT of same-sex couples with kids, and their kids seem fine to me. That's because it's more about how the couple parents than what gender the couple is.) Same old prejudice.

Some might say a prom might not mean a whole lot, since it's something that happens in high school, but this kind of exclusion is nothing less than discrimination and creating nothing less than a hostile educational environment. If a student is noticeably excluded from something because of their identity, what message does that send? What kind of environment does that create? Really, this kind of exclusion is just the cousin of that institutionalized prejudice I was discussing. Both should have no place in this world. At. All.

Well, I am hoping for the best for Ms. McMillen and for the other kids that apparantly weren't good enough to be at Itawamba County's "real" prom. My heart goes out to them.