Crazy School Happenings
Pam has a post up about William Scherfel, Ambridge School Board Vice President, who called the high school's Gay-Straight Alliance a "sex club" and subsequently, "the faggots." It's disgusting to think that someone so filled with hate is an appointed steward of the welfare of children. I hope the community doesn't vote him back in. Based on his unrepentant tone (see Pam's post) I'd guess he'd run for re-election.

Pam also brings up another point I was just discussing with someone recently:
the vast majority of Pennsylvania students report hearing homophobic remarks such as "faggot" or "dyke" (82%), or the expressions "that’s so gay" or "you’re so gay" (93%) from other students while in school
I've heard my nieces and nephews say "that's so gay." They've "slipped up" and used it in front of me a few times (ah, I love going home for the holidays). The argument that "it's just a saying" is less than piss-poor. Do, I really need to ask someone to substitute any other minority group's descriptor into "that's so xxx"? The fact that it's left to me, the gay person, to point out why using gay in the pejorative is wrong speaks volumes. This should be an obvious one.

The 82% ad 93% figures are ones to remember when people, including some gay people I've heard discuss this, starting spreading the disinformation that gay kids today have it so easy. Obviously, that's not true not everywhere.

Elsewhere, Atrios fills us in on a school down in Texas that apparently never heard about Brown v. Board of Education:
For years, it was an open secret at North Dallas' Preston Hollow Elementary School: Even though the school was overwhelmingly Hispanic and black, white parents could get their children into all-white classes. And once placed, the students would have little interaction with the rest of the students. The result, a federal judge has ruled, was that principal Teresa Parker "was, in effect, operating, at taxpayer's expense, a private school for Anglo children within a public school that was predominantly minority."
...The judge also had sharp words for the district's attorneys, who argued that segregation would cause no harm to the minority students because their teachers used the same curriculum as those teaching white students."The court is baffled that in this day and age, that [DISD relied] on what is, essentially, a 'separate but equal' argument," the judge wrote.
It's frightening to realize that, in some parts of America, judiciaries are the only thing standing between what’s right and atrocities born in the whims of bigoted white people.