This month in Fulton, Mississippi, two girls wanted to go to prom together, and one of them wanted to wear a tux. When one of the girls—high school senior Constance McMillen—challenged the school’s written policy that prom dates must be of the opposite sex, the school board decided: NO PROM FOR ANYONE!
So McMillen–and the ACLU–are suing.
USA Today reports:
JACKSON, Miss. — The American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi today filed suit in federal court against the Itawamba County School System, which canceled the prom for one of its high schools when a student challenged a ban on bringing same-sex dates. The federal suit asks the court to force the school board to reinstate the prom and alleges that district officials have violated the First Amendment rights of Constance McMillen, a senior at Itawamba Agricultural High School.
“It’s shameful and cowardly of the school district to have canceled the prom and to try to blame Constance, who’s only standing up for herself,” said Christine Sun, an attorney with the ACLU national LGBT Project. “We will fight tooth and nail for the prom to be reinstated for all students.”
PhDork correctly summed up the school’s reasoning as: OMG LEZBOHZ! Honestly, there’s absolutely no logical way you can argue that Constance McMillen’s going to the prom with her girlfriend and wearing a tux poses a threat to anyone. SRSLY.
According to the Associated Press:
The school board issued a statement announcing it wouldn’t host the event, “due to the distractions to the educational process caused by recent events.”
The statement didn’t mention McMillen or the ACLU. When asked by the AP if McMillen’s demand led to the cancellation, school board attorney Michele Floyd said she could only reference the statement.
“I guess they would rather do that than what’s right, what’s constitutionally correct,” McMillen said.
I expect the court will be constitutionally correcting the Itawamba school board’s ass pretty soon. As for “distraction to the educational process”–give me a fucking break. We’re talking about the prom. You get dressed up, you dance awkwardly to a slow jam or two. Nothing educational happens at prom, unless it’s learning what happens as a result of too much Southern Comfort and/or unprotected sex. And hell, one of my high school friends–occasional Harpyness commenter veggiewood–wore a chic pantsuit to our prom, and it was never an issue. That was 18 years ago! Come on, Itawamba County…get a fucking grip!
Of course, historically, Southern bigots have always found a way to pay for something privately so they can exclude whoever they want, be it private schools, swimming pools or proms. So in the the best Mississippi segregationist tradition:
The school district had said it hoped a privately sponsored prom could be held. McMillen said if that happens, she’s sure she’ll be excluded.
“It’s a small town in Mississippi, and it’s run by an older generation with money. Most of them are more conservative and they don’t agree with it,” she said.
This event is reminiscent of how schools in nearby Charleston, MS, had separate proms for black and white students until 2008, when actor Morgan Freeman agreed to pay for an integrated one (of course, he’d first made the offer to do so in 1997; it took 11 years for it to be accepted.) The first integrated Charleston, MS prom was the subject of a documentary called “Prom Night in Mississippi.”
A Facebook group just started, asking Mississippi-loving Ellen Degeneres (her family is from Pass Christian) to organize Itawamba High School’s prom:
I’m asking Ellen DeGeneres, an awesome spokesperson for the LGBT community, and all-around cool person to organize a FABULOUS and unforgettable prom, for ALL the students, to which they can bring whomever they wish as their date. We need to send a mesage to the people of that town, and all towns, that if they target our kids with their hate, and intolerance, we will shower those kids with our love, and support, and isn’t Ellen is the perfect messenger for this? Please help me ask her, she is a busy woman, and there are so many people approaching her for things, but if enough of us are asking, we might just be able to get her attention, and maybe make it happen.
The comments on the FB page are really heartening. It would be great if Ellen would help. It would be even greater if the ACLU opens a giant can of whoop-ass on the Itawamba School District.
Let’s all send some serious Harpy love and support to Constance McMillen, who told the AP:
“My daddy told me that I needed to show them that I’m still proud of who I am,” McMillen told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. “The fact that this will help people later on, that’s what’s helping me to go on.”
Ah, Becky, you remembered! But perhaps I can blame getting grounded halfway through prom night on the pantsuit…
I don’t even know what to say about the ass hattery discussed here except, well, ass hats! Now, I would be down with canceling the prom if anyone threatened to wear an evening suit.
I hate it when they’re not even original. Then it’s not even a matter of “Can you believe these people?!?!”, it’s just…upsetting.
@veggiewood: Unless middle-aged ladies start going to proms, I think we’re safe from evening suits.
The ACLU must hate this time of year. It’s like clockwork, and the schools always lose and always look asinine.
I especially love the “private prom” idea. How very…white of them.
This shit is so ridiculous. I don’t understand why it’s such a big deal.
A girlfriend took me to her prom. Granted, neither of us had the AUDACITY to want to wear a tux; we were both happy in dresses.
I really hope that at least some of that girl’s classmates are less bigoted than their school’s administration, or that poor kid is going to have a miserable time of it in school. You know others are going to blame her for getting prom canceled instead of blaming the backwards attitudes of the school administrators.
Plenty of girls went to prom with each other if they didn’t have dates. I can’t recall anyone pissing up a tree about it. Hell, I took school dance pictures with my BF! Why is this such a huge deal? And if girls can show up with nipples hanging out of dresses and ass cheeks showing below hem lines why is anyone upset that she wants to wear a tux!?
I wonder, Gretchen, if the couple getting blamed by their fellow students was part of the attraction for the administration.
High school students are certainly capable of terrible bigotry, but they’re also pretty programmed to hate their school administrators. I hope the latter outweighs the former and they place the blame where it belongs.
Okay, I agree with all of you about the above points, but I thought I would point out the awesome fact that as soon as I started reading this post, the most explicitly sexual lesbian song in my iTunes library popped up on shuffle.
Yeah, Ocean Breeze, that’s what I was thinking: don’t girls go to dances together ALL THE TIME? In pairs and trios and groups? (OMG LEZBO ORJEEEZ)
Why, and when, was this “only mixed-gender couples wearing sex-defining clothing can attend prom” policy officialized? Wouldn’t the school need (recognizing there is no “need” here at all) to already be thinking about/aware of the presence of GLBTQ students to put that in writing?
And one more thing: those “distractions…caused by recent events” (nice passive voice, assholes) are going to be dwarfed by the distractions coming their way. If this school’s administration had two brain cells to rub together, they would know that they are going to come out of this looking like a bunch of cartoon crackers-4-christ.
So depressing. *searches for silver lining*
On the upside, that girl is really brave and her dad sounds awesome…
Av0gardo- these were my thoughts exactly. Knowing how mean and clique-y high school students can be, it wouldn’t surprise me at all to know that the two girls are being harrassed by other students because of this. They are now at fault for EVERYONE losing prom (in the eyes of the student body.) I can imagine the only reason that the school would take such a drastic step as cancelling prom instead of just allowing the girls to enter as dates would be to increase the antaganism towards the couple. Disgusting and immoral. Where is the “love thy neighbor” in that?
Ellen will probably have them on her show if it gets enough attention. Hey my kids high school had NO dances, NO social events, they were ALL canceled. A far cry from my own ‘pink carnation and a pickup truck’ wonder years.
@PhDork – The way my school did it, there was a different procedure for buying a single ticket vs. buying tickets for a couple. I think if you bought tickets for a couple, they were discounted or something, and you might have gotten registered for a picture or something. We also had to fill out a form identifying the student that we were taking to our prom if they didn’t go to our school. I bet that there’s something similar going on here — this girl might have tried to follow the “couple” procedure when following the “two single girls” procedure would have gone under the wire.
Alternately, it could be that this school is so far back in the stone age that they only sell tickets in couples.
Yeah, I don’t get the South sometimes. Ok, a lot of the time. I’ve been living in New Orleans for several years now, and despite being far more liberal here within the city than the rest of the South, the attitudes of people just continue to surprise me. There’s such a huge LGBT community in the city, not to mention LGBT tourism, that homophobia isn’t visibly more common than anywhere else (at least on the surface).
But race relations are just terrible. They didn’t integrate Mardi Gras parades until 1993, when the all-white-male Krewes were forced to allow women and minorities (aka black) people in to get parade licenses. Sure enough, a couple of the old-line parades – including Comus, the first krewe, and the first all-women’s krewe – shut down and stopped parading after over 150 years, rather than let black people in. Instead, as someone mentioned above, they followed the Southern tradition and went private – just holding private balls from which they could exclude anyone they want. Worse, many people still hate that law and see it as the end of the “real” Mardi Gras. As if the problem was the overdue integration rather than the racism. Then let’s not even talk about the schools and the police…but these are issues for another thread.
Considering that a quick google search for “gay student discrimination” turns up teacher suspensions from Chicago to New York and the murder of a middle schooler in California, I would DEEPLY appreciate it if we could stop talking about this problem as if it’s a Southern phenomenon.
@yvan: agreed. I feel like EVERY year prom rolls around and I hear some story about some bigoted high school denying entrance to a gay couple. It’s certainly not a southern phenomena by a long shot.
And not to totally thread jack but I feel like people who don’t live in the South have an often unwarranted sense of superiority, thinking their societies are somehow less bigoted. People tend to forget that MLK once said he found more “hatred in Chicago than in Alabama and Mississippi.”
I’m not saying all bigots are Southern. But these ones are, and I’m calling them on it.
Additionally, the whole “we’re going to privatize the schools/public swimming pools/proms/whatever so we can discriminate” is one of the hallmarks of Southern institutional/social discrimination. As someone who was born, raised and educated south of the Mason-Dixon line I have seen it OVER and OVER again, in churches, schools, country clubs, etc.
Sorry, y’all, but as a Southerner, I’ve got no problem calling out my own. Pretending like this shit happens totally independent of Southern culture is whitewashing.
Sorry, y’all, but as a Southerner, I’ve got no problem calling out my own. Pretending like this shit happens totally independent of Southern culture is whitewashing.
I agree with BeSharp.. seems like dif cultures progress at different rates, I live in the south and sometimes there IS an 800 lb elephant in the living room with a lampshade on his head.
Additionally, the whole “we’re going to privatize the schools/public swimming pools/proms/whatever so we can discriminate” is one of the hallmarks of Southern institutional/social discrimination.
I don’t disagree with this but in the northern states (particularly the mid-west which I am familiar with) there was simply a massive white flight out to the suburbs which was just same shit, different method. There’s been a lot written about how in these states the racism goes more under cover because of the physical distance white’s have put between themselves and people of color and that such a physical distance isn’t as noticeable in many southern states.
@bluebears: Yeah, you’re right about white flight and redlining having a similar effect, but it’s still not quite the same thing, because in the South, it was the local/state governments who did it, in flagrant violation of the law and constitution. In some places municipalities actually closed public schools and parks rather than integrate. Mississippi was by far the worst offender in this regard and to think that the mindset has completely reversed or erased itself in less than a generation is illogical (many of the people who run the schools now, for example, attended segregated schools/clubs/Boy Scouts, etc).
I was constantly smacked in the face by this growing up. The small mountain city in VA where I spent my summers had a whole alternative chain of private schools that were created in the ’60s specifically to avoid integration–many of my friends attended them, and their parents made no bones about why. In the Virginia town where I went to college, there was a “black” supermarket and a “white” supermarket–because the owner of the “white” one had historically refused to serve black customers and even though it was the mid-90s, the two communities still observed the tradition.
As a famous Southerner said, “The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past.” It’s better, yes, but it’s by no means past.
Every time I think we’re past the point where a woman in pants is seen as a danger to society . . .
I agree with Becky and Joe. I’m from the West Coast and lived all over the States before moving to the South. There’s racism everywhere, true, but it’s a different world down here. It’s open and in-your-face in a way it isn’t in the rest of the country. Plus, as Becky said, it’s institutionalized, something you won’t see elsewhere.
Schools here are still functionally segregated, because the whites pulled out to the suburbs and/or moved their children into private schools – something further aided by the selling out of the public school system to the charters post-Katrina. The better schools are 90%+ white, and the horribly underfunded public schools (often missing such basics as textbooks, A/C, and functioning plumbing) are 95%+ black & Latino. And forget “functionally”, schools here were still formally segregated as late as the 1980s! My friend’s older brother went to fully segregated schools in Jefferson Parish (home of David Duke) that did not integrate until after his graduation in the early 1980s (1983 IIRC).
Then there are the roads, which are bad throughout the city but MUCH worse in the black neighborhoods. Same with public services. Same with police – I can call from Uptown and get a cop to respond relatively promptly, but if you’re calling from Central City forget about it (unless you report a naked woman running around. No, I’m not joking or being sarcastic – people have tested this). Plus the 1993 integration of MG krewes I mentioned earlier.
There’s racism everywhere. But not only is it more visible here, it’s more acceptable and more built into the legal and social systems here than I’ve seen anywhere else in this country.
@viajera: And just to bring the discussion back to homophobia….In the South, the infrastructure of discrimination–while it was specifically set up to exclude blacks–is frequently used against other miniorities, including gays, Jews and immigrants. Once people are accustomed to discrimination and exclusion, it’s very easy for them to automatically other-ize anyone who’s different. That’s what I think we’re seeing here, with Constance McMillen.
Brennan: Women were told at my 1995 HS graduation that if we wore pants to the ceremony, we would be sent home to ‘put on some decent clothes.’ I was one of three women who wore pants, and did not get sent home. But I kinda would have enjoyed the shitstorm my family would have caused if I had – much as we fight and get on each others nerves, you don’t screw around with my family, because you will not enjoy the consequences.
@viajera – I have had exactly the opposite experience: having lived in the South and in the North, I find racism is much more “in your face” in the North, only the racists pat themselves on the back for “being honest”. And it’s gross.
@Becky – I’m not saying don’t call out southern racists — I’m fully in the camp of calling out ALL racists. But when a story about bigotry in the North comes around on the internet (say, I dunno, the young men from Long Island that are on trial now for murdering a Latino man, as part of a sport they call “beaner jumping” which is just randomly assaulting Latino men on the street: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/21/nyregion/21immigrant.html), the news is reported as: WHAT?!! WHAT A SHOCK!!! And when a story about bigotry in the South comes around on the internet it’s treated as, “Well, what do you expect? Southerners…” and it really pisses me off. bluebears is totally right: it comes with an undercurrent of moral superiority that is completely unwarranted, and, what’s more, leads to people in the North not working to correct their own prejudices.
And as far as infrastructure and cops not responding to calls in black neighborhoods – everyone in Chicago knew that cops wouldn’t respond to calls in Cabrini Green; anyone at all can tell you that Bushwick and East New York don’t have the same transportation dollars spent on them as Staten Island, and even the fact that Albany prevents NYC from getting its fair share of tax dollars is a product of racism. Amadou Diallo? Sean Bell? Omar Edwards?
I’m not trying to say that bigotry isn’t a problem in the South, but bigotry is not a Southern problem.
Well, bigotry is not EXCLUSIVELY a Southern problem.
Yeah, that’s the implication I was going for.
[...] Prom (oting) Homophobia – rather than allow an openly lesbian student attend prom in a tuxedo with her date, a high school in Missippi has completely nixed the whole shebang. The ACLU is involved in the case at this point. [...]
::delurks::
As a MS expat, I wanted to say that the whole “can we stop talking as though racism is a Southern problem?” theme in this comment thread–while well-intentioned, I’m sure–does a disservice to the South and just distracts from the very real problems we have.
Discrimination IS a huge problem in my home state, and it is often supported or even instigated by people who should know better–local government, churches, pastors, school boards, etc. What’s happened to Constance is pretty much par for the course…the system is flexible, and it will bend to find a way to exclude you.
And it’s not a coincidence that things are that way. Cultural context matters. Yes, there is racism and discrimination elsewhere. No one is debating that. But making the point of “oh, Chicago’s really racist too!” is just a distraction, not proof that the South’s history is irrelevant.
I also want to say that what I read in this post is WAAAAY more even-handed in its treatment of the South than what I’ve read about the McMillen case elsewhere on the internet (where “redneck”, “KKK” and “Mississippi Burning” keep coming up). I don’t know if that’s because Becky is Southern or just because this site tends to be more thoughtful in tone, but I appreciated it.
@OleMiss – You see it as a distraction from real issues of racism in the South to point out racism in the North, but I see it as a distraction from real issues of racism in the North for Northerners to constantly say, “Well, of course, it’s the South!” No one is arguing that the South’s history is irrelevant. Obviously cultural context matters, but the fact that so many people take a cursory approach to cultural context adds to (or maybe even causes) the problem: “The South used to have slavery, therefore, the South is now racist. The North didn’t have slavery, therefore, the North is not racist.”
I agree that the post is even-handed in this regard, but the reason I brought it up in the first place was the comments.