American exceptional-fat-and-cluelessism

NYT, Filed at 7:49 p.m. EST

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Two lesbian teens at Champlin Park High School have taken the state's largest school district to federal court because they want a judge to force the district to allow them to make a political statement by making a high-profile entrance to a pep fest as a couple on Monday.

Students at the school elected Desiree "Dez" Shelton and Sarah Lindstrom, both 18-year-old seniors, earlier this month as part of the Snow Days Pep Fest Royalty Court. Members of the court have traditionally been put into male-female couples and processed through the field house to a stage while an announcer said a few facts about each couple. The 2011 pep fest is scheduled for Monday afternoon.

A district spokeswoman said the Champlin Park High School principal didn't want the young women to walk in together because he feared they would be teased, but the lawsuit said denying them that opportunity was discrimination and an infringement of their First Amendment rights. The Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Center for Lesbian Rights filed the lawsuit Friday afternoon on their behalf.

Anoka-Hennepin schools spokeswoman Mary Olson said the women said they weren't comfortable walking in with a male student. Principal Michael George was concerned about the reaction of other students to a lesbian couple walking in together, Olson said, so on Friday the district decided the royal court would arrive individually or accompanied by a parent or favorite teacher.

"We believe we have come up with a better practice that is more tolerate and acceptable to all students," Olson said, adding that the traditional method assumed students were heterosexual while the new system makes no assumptions at all.

Sam Wolfe, a lawyer for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said that wasn't good enough. "The intent is really clear," he said. "The district does not want the same-sex couple walking in together."

But, the lawsuit said, walking in together was precisely why Shelton and Lindstrom campaigned to be elected by their peers in the first place. "Their intention was to make a political and public statement about gender roles" and lesbian and gay students, the lawsuit said.

Wolfe noted Shelton and Lindstrom were selected by their fellow students, suggesting the student body may be more comfortable with the teens' sexual orientation than administrators believe.

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OK, let's get this out of the way quickly. I believe Gay Americans and Straight Americans (as well as Bi and TG people) should have exactly the same rights, responsibilities, and protections under law. Since gay and straight people are people, gay and straight people also should be afforded equal respect due every human being. That covers everybody; every sexual majority and minority. Any ideology or doctrine that implies otherwise is not valid. End of discussion.

That being said, at this very moment, a revolution in Egypt is threatening to become a regional cataclysm with global implications (think oil), America is becoming "not America" because a significant number of its citizens no longer want to accept the responsibilities of citizenship ( ~50% voter turnout, reaganism-teapartyism, an entrenched plutocracy attempting to do away with democracy), and use of non-renewable resources to power human society is poisoning the planet.

Do we have the luxury of caring who goes down on whom? Are we Americans inhabiting an alternate universe?