Miss. school prom off after lesbian's date request - Yahoo! News

Miss. school prom off after lesbian's date request

Limited-minded school officials.

Twenty years ago to the year was my senior prom. I lived in a backwater in the lower Midwest, not exactly a bastion of free thought and speech. I have a photo of my boyfriend and I, in our Dillinger theme dressup, at the prom, with a friend, E - she was wearing a tuxedo and a cowboy hat. She was an in-closet lesbian at the time, but everybody knew. Girls danced with each other at my high school proms all the time, and if they'd started kissing, they would've likely gotten the same treatment from Mr. T (our principal) as did the boy/girl couples: A tap on the shoulder and a withering look to knock it off. His job was to simply keep anything nasty from happening on school grounds (which is fair), not to legislate our preferences.

TWENTY YEARS AGO.

Why does it feel like things have slid backwards? Not just this - this is just a smudge, a symptom of a larger problem. And it's not just tolerance/acceptance of consenting adults (or even older kids, as the case may be). It feels like women's rights, religious freedom (as in, freedom FROM in addition to freedom OF), and a few other things are more restricted than they used to be ...