APRIL 22 . 2006 • Q-NOTES
«jor
& so
CAROLIN
Volume 20 • No. 25 • April 22, 2006
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Out in the Stars
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%ditor*s note
In the
name of
God and
bigotry
when 1 was a
kid in the Chariotte-Meckienburg Schooi
System back in the ’70s and ’80s nobody
ever taiked about forming a gay-straight
aiiiance ciub. Nobody ever taiked about
gay anything uniess it was in a disparag
ing manner. There were a few individuais
in iater years of high schooi that got up the
guts to come out (if I was wearing a hat I’d be
tipping it at Raymond, Todd, Terry and Justin
right now) but 1 wasn’t one of them.
Right after 1 was handed my dipioma I
did — at the age of 17 — but by that time
1 wasn’t surrounded on a daiiy basis by
confused juveniies dnd homophobic
administrators. .
Even though i hadn’t come out yet, 1
distinctiy recaii one particuiar teacher at
Spaugh )r. High — her name was Mariiynn
Hartiey — voicing her disapprovai about
how she perceived my sexuaiity on more
than one occasion in front of muitipie stu
dents. Then there was the band director —
loseph Chambers — who feit he had to teii
the entire ciass that he thought it was “dis
gusting” when Elton |ohn admitted he was
bisexual. How many students in the room
that day felt they themselves were “dis
gusting” because their teacher had just
said so?
in Salisbury at Rowan County High
School 17-year-old Britney Sharp has
been the focus of a lot of attention lately
because she and another student formed a
Gay/Straight Alliance (GSA) club this past
February. When Sharp approached the
principal about securing a meeting place
for club members to talk about issues that
they face, she was told that approval for
such a club would have to come from the
Rowan County School Board.
Initially, members of the board —
begrudgingly — approved the club because
they were advised that they were required
to do so by law.
Pbof! Bam! Zowie!
Operation Save America (OSA) to the res
cue! Faster than the chariot of Moses, able to
leap the tallest steeples in a single bound, it’s
Possessed Evangelical Man (PEM)I
“The national God is going back to
school campaign starts with a bang!”
Shouts PEM. “If we do not fight this battle
now when we have a good chance of win
ning in Jesus’ name, we may find ourselves
having to fight when there is little or no
hope of victory, realizing that it is better to
die free than live under the bondage of
homosexual slavery.”
Huh?
“It is time for God’s Church to rise up,
come out of the closet and confront this
giant in the name of ]esus Christ,” screams
PEM. “The theology of the Church must
become biography in the streets!”
Blah, blah, blah.
Flip Benham, of course, is the wordsmith
behind ail this theocratic gobbledy-goop.
m
Benham and his followers at
OSA showed up at Rowan
County High School and then
again before the school board,
convincing them to do a 360
and vote against Britney’s GSA.
While Benham was at the meeting he
handed out about 40 T-shirts, which stu
dents have been wearing to class since the
board announced that they intended to
disallow the club.
Small technicality: Turns out the board
twisted the facts.
“When they were told that legally they
couldn’t refuse the GSA, board member )im
Shuping dug around and found a policy that
prohibits any club that interrupts class time,”
said Alex Wagaman, a representative of the
National Conference for Community and
justice. “Principal Ron Turbyfill told them that
the club did not interrupt class time, so he
didn’t feel like that was applicable.”
Cabarrus County School Boardmembers
announced that they would not allow the
club, when in reality Shuping put forward a
motion to form the appropriate policy for
the board to vote on at its next meeting
(according to their calendar the next meet
ing is April 27 at 6 p.m.).
In other words, the club is actually still
allowed to exist, if a teacher agrees to take
on the role of advisor.
One of the two advisors who were sup
porting the club has already backed off
because she says she’s afraid she’ll lose
her job.
According to Sharp, Principal Turbeyfill
and Vice Principal East are being “reas
signed” to other schools.
Meanwhile, Sharp’s days at school
have grown increasingly difficult.
“The next day at school there were
about 15 people wearing those Operation
Save America shirts,” says Sharp.
“A lot of them walked past me and Jeff,
my best friend, and they would say stuff
like ‘Shut Down! You got your gay club
taken away!’
“Then later in the day after it was
decided that I should leave the campus for
my own safety, they were screaming
things at me like ‘Carpet muncher! You
and your lesbian lover are going to hell!”
In another extremely unusual incident,
Sharp recalls a time in her Algebra class
when a student sitting next to her pulled
out his Bible and started reading from it.”
According to Sharp the class advisor
Rose Chorriher, “didn’t do anything about
it until the end of the class.”
Despite the fact the student was in an
Algebra class and not a biblical study
course makes it clear that his feigned
“reading” was in protest to Sharp’s pres
ence. The fact that the class advisor did
not intervene until mere moments before
the class bell rang confirms that she was
not concerned about Sharp and other stu
dents being distracted from their appropri
ate course of learning.
1 know that many of us have forgotten
the difficulties faced by a child or teenager
that others perceive as different from
themselves — not to mention the child or
teenager who’s actually bold enough to
come to terms with what it is about them
selves that’s actually different.
Hat’s off to you, Britney.;-)
— David Moore
Editor