Posted on 05/08/2005 7:17:22 AM PDT by madprof98
White County has become center of emotional clash over equal rights
Cleveland --- A year and half ago, White County High School student Abby Farrar told a friend she had a crush on a classmate --- a girl.
Soon came the stares, followed by vulgarities. Then boys, with a smirk, would block her locker, making her late for classes. Formerly in the gifted program, Abby began making all C's. She started stealing anti-depressants and painkillers prescribed for her diabetic mother. She eventually dropped out of school.
"People would whisper, and you know it's about you," said Abby, now 15. "I didn't want to die, but I thought about it."
Abby is a gay teenager in this postcard sliver of the Appalachian Mountains, where pickup trucks rule dusty roads and billboards breathe Bible verses. White County is also the backdrop for the latest clash between gay rights and conservative Christians, triggered in January when a junior named Kerry Pacer asked the school administration to allow her to form a club for gay students and their supporters.
The town has been on an emotional roller coaster ride ever since. Residents were polarized on the issue of whether the students should be allowed to form the club but banded together when Christian fundamentalists from Kansas picketed the school and some local churches. The controversy has lured the American Civil Liberties Union and gay rights activists, prompting the school district to rethink its policy and the club to rethink its mission.
The club --- Peers Rising in Diverse Education, or PRIDE --- was started by Pacer, a slight, 5-foot 17-year-old with a nose stud and a part-time job serving pastrami at a deli. She got the idea after learning about other gay support clubs in Atlanta and nationwide.
Her efforts drew the attention of the Georgia chapter of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay rights organization, which planned to give her special recognition Saturday night at a $195-per-plate reception in downtown Atlanta. Guests such as Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin and Democratic political strategist James Carville were expected to attend. Kerry planned to go with her mother and some school friends.
"We couldn't find a better example of someone who obviously had the courage to speak up in an area where it's difficult to speak up," said Deneen Goddard, an organizer for the event.
Pacer feels grateful and encouraged by the recognition. "I know what I'm doing is good," she said. "They could put as many hurdles as they want, but I'm never giving up."
But in the day-to-day world of White County High, her determination is tested. She and other gay students such as Alex Sherman, Chris Garner and Charlene Hammersen go to their classes and get taunted and bullied. They lean on humor and one another to get through the hallways and to mend their spirits.
White County Public Schools Superintendent Paul Shaw opposes the club, which has met twice and so far has fewer than 10 members, because he believes that an organization based on sexuality does not belong in a high school. He has allowed it, he says, because the students have the legal right to gather and have met all the criteria for an extracurricular club.
But opposition has pushed Shaw and administrators to consider ending all nonacademic activities so that the club is kept out.
At a recent public meeting on the proposal, everyone who spoke was opposed to ending all clubs just to make PRIDE impossible.
Many of the parents said they feared that, without service clubs and sports, their children would be at a disadvantage when applying for college.
Besides, said resident Carol Ann Lightsey, "I believe there should be a place where these kids could go and unload when they are being bullied."
Harassment and hate
Those incidents still happen, and sometimes they drive students away from the school.
Chris Garner, 16, says he was called "faggot" and hit in the hallways last year. He said he was whacked in the back of his head with a two-by-four in construction class. Six months later, Chris gave up on White County High. He's now being home schooled.
Shaw acknowledges bullying incidents and says that they are being investigated, but he isn't convinced that all gay students are victims. "They have strong personalities as well" and invite trouble, too, he said.
Many times, Shaw said, harassment allegations turn out to be a "he said, she said," with no clear solution. He declined to discuss individual complaints, but said, "It's our job to provide a safe environment for academic learning."
The controversy "has made our community look at ourselves," said Shaw, a grandfather who has been an educator for more than 30 years.
That reflection was evident in March when eight members of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan., staged a vitriolic protest in Cleveland on a Sunday morning. They hurled insults at worshippers for not condemning homosexuality strongly enough. Many Christian moderates were disgusted.
"We don't need these people to tell me how to live," said Rolland Hunnicutt, 43, who has two daughters attending the high school. He opposes the PRIDE club but doesn't appreciate outsiders entering the fray. "We were told to ignore these people, bite our tongue, but it's hard. It makes it very difficult to pray for people like these."
Birth of a club
Ninety miles north of downtown Atlanta, more than 700 students are packed into the nondescript, red-brick White County High School building. The girls wear capri pants and boys don cargo shorts, just like high school students in Atlanta.
But here, an organization like PRIDE is an anomaly. The school requires that the vice principal attend every meeting.
Originally called the Gay-Straight Alliance, the group was renamed and became a more inclusive anti-bullying club. Last week, Pacer and a handful of students, gay and straight, listed goals to achieve next year if the club still exists: community service, guest speakers, field trips and fund-raisers.
Pacer was inspired to create PRIDE after attending a meeting of the Gainesville chapter of PFLAG --- Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays --- which her mother and other parents formed in January after discovering enough families with gay children in Hall and White counties.
There Kerry found out about other gay support clubs. Her determination grew stronger when a vice principal at White County High forbade her to hang up two posters urging tolerance for families with same-sex parents.
Now, at the center of the controversy, she has learned that fame --- and change --- comes at a price. Several weeks ago she walked into Glenda's, a local diner, with her friend Charlene Hammersen. Heads turned and faces glared, Kerry remembers. She felt unwelcome in the eatery, where she had dined who knows how many times before.
Then there were the letters to the editor of the local paper, the White County News-Telegraph.
"If we stand idly by and allow this to happen, then we as Christians, professed to be saved by God, will answer come Judgment Day," wrote a local minister, Teddy Allen. His was one of many expressing such sentiments.
Pacer was surprised. "Everybody was getting mad at such a small issue," she said. "They see it as a total corruption. They say we're trying to turn people gay or we're trying to recruit gays. It's awful. People have said that to me."
Slow acceptance
Pacer wears hip-hugging jeans and cherishes her Plymouth Neon. After school, she heads to her $6-an-hour job as a waitress and cook. The native of a Baltimore suburb is the middle child of three of divorced parents. She lives with her mother, a real estate agent; her father is a DeKalb County teacher.
Savannah Pacer, 52, says her daughter's safety is her No. 1 concern. "I worry about somebody trying to harm her," she said. But she's proud of her daughter's courage. "I'm learning from her."
So are others.
Before accepting their own homosexuality, Charlene Hammersen and Alex Sherman were like the other kids --- they called Kerry names. Now they hug each other freely in school hallways.
For Alex, 16, who is the club's vice president, ''coming out'' to his parents was a cold lesson in reality. ''They just didn't want to talk about it," said Alex, who is on the swimming and tennis teams.
On April 30, the two said a boy threw a piece of jagged concrete at them near their locker. It hit Alex's left shin.
Because of what the gay students at White County High go through, Pacer believes that PRIDE must succeed. "They'll be hurting us more by taking the club away. They'll be saying it's OK to bully us," she said.
The club, and Kerry herself, brought Abby back to White County High in February. Four months earlier, Abby spent a week at the Riverwoods Southern Regional Psychiatric Center in Riverdale, where she opened up to a therapist about her homosexuality, the harassment and the junk food she gorged on to hide her feelings.
She went to a night school in Dahlonega where she wouldn't be picked on. Then she read about Kerry Pacer.
Kerry's going to get hurt, Abby, who is 5-foot-9, remembers thinking. She's so little; I'm going to be her bodyguard.
Soon, Abby re-enrolled at White County High as a sophomore.
Sounds as if they gave the writer of this piece a free lunch.
Not a whole lot to be proud of there.
Be that as it may, here in the U.S.A. they just get into trouble with drugs, alcohol and sex.
Homosexual teenagers are no different in that respect. But, they have such a disconnect with normalcy that they spend even MORE time with alcohol, drugs and sex -- that is, promiscuity, prostitution and the diseases that go with them.
They really DON'T have anywhere to go but to the homosexual community. And THAT is just a catastrophe for them any way you look at it.
I just luv purple prose with all the stereotype trimmings. It's not like the writer had an axe to grind, or anything...
The only things missing were the banjoes.
Morality and all of its associated concepts are from the belief some higher power defines what is correct in human behavior. Today, morals are a religious pagan philosophy of esoteric hobgoblins. Transfiguration is a pantheon of fantasies as the medium of infinitization. Others get derision for having an unwavering Judaic belief in Yahweh or Yeshua, although their critics and enemies will evangelize insertion of phantasmagoric fetishisms into secular law.
There are three ways people are influenced according to the school of behavioral psychology - - visual (sight), auditory (sound), kinesthetic (emotion). The kinesthetic or ‘feeling’ is also olfactory and tactile sense, just like Pavlov’s salivating dogs (conditioned responses).
Considering that 90% of people tend to be more influenced by the visual, television has become a new religion. It is analogous to Plato’s cave allegory and the pagan Oracle of Delphi. The visual media as a propaganda tool helps create visual phantasms or fantastical images in the brain.
Was Freudian psychoanalytic theory of sexual stages in psychological development more accurate than accredited? The Michael Jackson Complex is fixation on mutilation of and deviance with human anatomy in the media. It is a social psychosis catering to the lowest common denominator and generated with Pavlovian behavioral conditioning in popular culture.
Visual images and sound portrayed can be used to anchor emotional and/or conditioned responses desired by those that present them, which is the case of the visual media, actors who create fantastical images in film, and Leftist politicians who pander to ‘symbolism over substance.’
Observe when in public places, at your workplace or in other community activities (i.e., restaurants, retail stores, gas stations, etc.) the pervasive presence of some exposure to music or television. This is because many people are actually terrified of being alone with their own thoughts or at the prospect of it (neuro-linguistic programming).
There is a clear connection between modern neo-paganism and ancient paganism related to Islamic conflict with the Judaic roots of Christendom. A focus on how this is manifested in a modern sense only requires a look at pop-culture icons in entertainment, steroid sports "heroes," and attempts by the Left to use a pseudo-Judaic sense of pagan moralistic idolatry to demonize political opposition. (Attacks on U.S. Senator Rick Santorum for comments on sodomy, and the ostracizing of U.S. Senator Zell Miller within the Democratic Party are cases in point.)
It is no coincidence Islamist pagans hate Israel, Jews, Christians and Western Civilization. The entire basis of Western Civilization is Mosaic Law; something both the Neo-Pagan Left and the pagan Islamist thugs cannot abide and wish to destroy.
Should we really be canonizing special societal privileges in secular law based on idolatrous fetishes? Perhaps civil union advocates in politics, the press, and the homosexual apologists could conclave to enshrine their own phantasmal state religion and consecrate Michael Jackson as its first ecumenical Pope!
Contemplate the macabre pagan elements of Michael Jackson's video, Thriller, and his Nation of Islam entourage escorting their pharaoh to and from court. A Golden Calf.
XX or XY chromosomes are immutable after conception when mitosis begins. There are genetic abnormalities/defects, but these are not procreant genotypes: XO (Turner syndrome), XXY (Klinefelter syndrome), XXX (poly-X syndrome), and XYY (Jacob syndrome). No matter how many X-chromosomes there are, any individual with the Y-chromosome is male. These anomalies are so few, only one in several thousands occurs. No person is "transgendered," nor can any person have a "sex change;" it is disfigurement and erroneous terminology. Any hypothesis of a "gay gene" is duplicitous fallacy....
Homosexuality: a birth defect, mental illness or choice?
This story has all the above mentioned qualities - - self-mutilation, deviant use of anatomy and the idolatrous supporters of it...
XX or XY chromosomes are immutable after conception when mitosis begins. There are genetic abnormalities/defects, but these are not procreant genotypes: XO (Turner syndrome), XXY (Klinefelter syndrome), XXX (poly-X syndrome), and XYY (Jacob syndrome). No matter how many X-chromosomes there are, any individual with the Y-chromosome is male. These anomalies are so few, only one in several thousands occurs. No person is "transgendered," nor can any person have a "sex change;" it is disfigurement and erroneous terminology. Any hypothesis of a "gay gene" is duplicitous fallacy.
Homosexuality: a birth defect, mental illness or choice?
See my previous post...
no barf alert?
The writer is probably a homosexual too.
It seems newspapers should start dying faster. They serve no public function.
It's crude propaganda, at best. First, we must accept that Abby was born Abby-normal, even though no genetic factor has been found to make humans homosexual. Second, having hopefully accepted that, we must rush to sympathise with Abby because the KKK will probably be after her next.
Soon came the stares, followed by vulgarities. Then boys, with a smirk, would block her locker, making her late for classes. Formerly in the gifted program, Abby began making all C's. She started stealing anti-depressants and painkillers prescribed for her diabetic mother. She eventually dropped out of school.
"People would whisper, and you know it's about you," said Abby, now 15. "I didn't want to die, but I thought about it."
And to think this whole series of events could have been avoided had she just kept her mouth shut. She could've gone on liking chicks, and no one would've been the wiser. She wouldn't have been mistreated for being a lesbo, and she would've stayed in school (most likely).
It's amazing what keeping your mouth shut about your personal life will do for you! However, I doubt she, or anyone like her, would ever see it that way. Their mantra isn't "Let me live my life" it's "We're here, we're queer, get used to it."
Charming.
If Pacer was living somewhere else, Pacer would be working at Starbucks.
Note how they homosexual recruiting groups are shifing names.
They don't want the keywords GLSEN or GSA to trigger news clipping programs.
This is nothing more than facilitating recreational sex for highschool students. Since most homosexuals had their first sex experince as children it only makes sense they continue to label children.
(remember homosexual operate under "one drop of blood rule" that is followed by race baiter doctrine. One homosexual experience, volutary or INvoluntary makes the victim a homosexual.)
The fact that democrats STILL push homosexualizing childrem should doom the membership levels of the party. What kind of self respecting mother or father with children or nieces and nephews or grandchildren wants to associalte with these perverts?
"the answer here is to teach these children to treat each other with respect even if they disagree."
These are not disagreements. The answer here is to stop making these kids comfortable with sharing their desires to stimulate another person of the same sex sexually and keep such desires to themselves. There is no pride in perversion no matter how hard "we" try to teach otherwise.
Pride cannot be manufactured, it can't be imported from China, it can't be sold at Wal-mart, and it cannot be based on wanting to put your mouth on another guy's pecker.
"PRIDE" is very deliberate. It eliminates the "gay' out of the club name which triggers the auto news clippers and immediatly sets of parents.
AND
"Pride" is used in many black owned businesses. Pride Cleaners, Pride Carpentry, Pride autosales. (real estate ads which list a dump in a bad neigborhood as 'pride of ownership') It is a blatent and Goebles effort to use RACE as a cover for a homosexual dating/recruiting club.
They want to recruit black/minority people to the advocacy of homosexual sex. Obviously the homosexuals now experience resistence from homosexual clubs so now they put bully clubs which can be started in innercity schools so they can claim they are still expanding.
It also sets up parents to look like they are racists because they oppose "diversity" clubs.
Utter hogwash. It is the EXACT same thing as GSA, just a new name for manure pushing.
"pride" is just a way to have a GSA without the G in the name.
So True: We all have certain things that make us horny, things that turn us on more than others . We dont go around telling others what these things are , and we shouldnt. If you are a peter-puffer or a carpet muncher, you should keep it to yourself.
Why dont they ? Because if no one knows what they are they arent sought out for sex. This girl was looking to have sex with another girl so she put her perversion out on the street. She was baiting her trap for another girl and got caught. Now they want to start a club so they can more efficiently find others with the same perversion.It isnt about freedom its about finding sex partners.
I'd like to hear your thoughts on cannibalism.
bingo and bulls eye!
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