Insufficiently Downcast Eyes. A sophomore at Atlanta's Morehouse College, one of the most prestigious of the nation's private, historically black colleges, is charged with beating another student on the head with a baseball bat and fracturing his skull after the victim allegedly looked at him in the shower. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "Some students at Morehouse, an all-male college, say they can understand what might have motivated his attacker." The paper reports that the victim was a music student and a member of the college glee club. The attacker turned himself in after speaking with his father, a Chicago minister. "Irrespective of motivation, Morehouse has a zero tolerance policy of any act of aggression," said the college dean.
I wonder if anyone will note that not too long ago a black man routinely risked a vicious beating, or worse, if he was thought to have looked at a white woman the "wrong" way. Would a college dean have then opined that "irrespective of motivation" such an attack would be unacceptable behavior?
Get 'Loose. Here's a follow-up on the Boyd
County, Kentucky story about protests led by local ministers
against a high school's new gay-straight alliance. As noted in a
posting on Monday, hundreds of students stayed home to express
their opposition to gays and straights meeting together on school
grounds. Now the
Courier-Journal reports that anti-gay activists from as far
away as Sacramento, California, showed up at an anti-alliance rally
to egg on the locals and stoke the fires even further:
David Miller, vice president of Citizens for Community Values, a Cincinnati pro-family activist group, told those attending the rally across the street from the high school that they can serve as an example for others who oppose gay-rights organizations in schools".The Rev. Tim York -- a leader of off-campus opponents of the alliance, pastor of Heritage Temple Free Will Baptist Church and president of the Boyd County Ministerial Association -- said yesterday he will file an appeal today with Boyd County superintendent Bill Capehart of the decision to allow the group to meet.
One parent told the paper, "We're standing up for our godly
rights". I think we have to protect our children at all costs."
Still, there was also this:
Tim Dail, 20, a 2000 Boyd County High graduate from Ashland and one of the few alliance supporters who showed up, said he would have been a member of the alliance if it had existed when he was in school. "'Homosexual kids always have it toughest," Dail said. "They're the ones who are ostracized for being different."
In the movie "Footloose," Kevin Bacon fights against the local Bible-Belt minister and parents who"ve forbidden high school dances as "immoral, -- and the kids -- struggling to find their own, more open interpretation within their religious tradition -- join his rebellion. In other words, the kids in the movie knew enough to be on the side of freedom. When that happens in all the Boyd Counties across America, we"ll know the tide has turned.