Pro-Gay T-Shirts

Maybe it's just me, but I read this article and had to stop what I was doing (other than reading the article) just so I could pause and reflect and shout (in my head), "Am I the only one who can see what's going on?!?"

In Holmes County, Florida, a high school student is suing the School Board for suppressing her right to express in-school support for gays. U.S. District Judge Richard Smoak may return soon with a decision as to whether she has that right or not.

Heather Gillman, a 17-year-old junior at Ponce DeLeon High School, wants the right to wear T-shirts to school that have gay pride symbols and/or slogans supporting gay rights. She claims that last year, she wore a T-shirt to school with a pro-gay message and no administrators asked her to remove the shirt, nor did she get into any trouble. This year, between September 21 and 24, several students were suspended for wearing similar T-shirts. Gillman claims that her wearing of the T-shirts was not just about the message, but that she specifically did it to oppose the principal's suspension of the 10 students.

Gillmann was instructed through a School Board letter that shirts with messages on them are not acceptable. Now she fears that she will be suspended too if she continues to wear them, claiming that it is a suppression of her right to free speech.

The School Board contends that it does have the right to suppress free speech if it could lead to disruptions in learning.

Judge Smoak decided that this needed to be settled in a trial - including whether or not the messages Gillman wants to convey are appropriate for the age of the students that would be exposed to them, as well as whether of not they would be deemed "vulgar". Also, Smoak wants to see if there is a clear connection between the slogans and disruptions in school activities. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that free speech in schools cannot be suppressed unless it causes disruptions in the learning process.

Am I the only one who notices the disruption?

The student is in court, rather than in school! The principal is in court, rather than at the school! Members of the School Board are probably in the courtroom, rather than presiding over School Board issues!

Clearly this is a disruption! The argument can be made that this disruption wouldn't have occurred if there hadn't been an argument over whether or not the T-shirt slogans caused disruptions in the first place - but one can just as easily make the argument that the T-shirt slogans caused disruptions in the first place because the student did follow the School Board's advice in the first place and stop wearing them.

Frankly, I'm still a little perturbed that students can even wear T-shirts at school - but that's a result of attending a private high school with dress codes including rules that all shirts must have collars and must be solid color and cannot contain writing/logos larger than a standard business card and must also be tucked in at all times. That's right - we could get suspended just for having untucked shirts too many times - and she's fighting to wear pro-gay slogan T-shirts?

I side with the school, and encourage them to set up stricter and more-regulated dress codes. The blurrier and less clear the lines are drawn, the more problems like these are going to arise. I still like the notion of uniforms for all schools - students should be worrying less about what they are going to wear and more about LEARNING. Maybe if we had fewer students trying to challenge "the man" with lawsuits and freedom of speech, our test scores wouldn't be in the toilet and we'd have high school seniors who could actually READ and DO MATH.

Seriously, open up a newspaper any day of the week and you're likely to find at least one news article about our failing education system and graduating students who can't even read well enough to get by or do the simple math that would allow them to be a functional cashier at a fast-food restaurant.

I'm not anti-gay. I'm not anti-freedoms. I just think that there's a time and place for it all, and a high school classroom is not the place for it. I would have the same opinion if the slogans were on either side of the gay rights agenda, political candidates, or even illegal immigration. If this were about a student arguing the right to wear a T-shirt saying "ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION IS ILLEGAL", I'd still favor the School Board telling that student to take the shirt off, sit their ass down in the classroom and fucking LEARN things.

Do you agree? Or are you going to call me an anti-gay hatemonger for trying to argue that school is for learning and arguments over what is distracting are just as distracting as the items that are being argued about?

(The actual article, if I didn't paraphrase it well enough here)


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Rallying Against Rap? Tough.

When I was growing up, there was a word repeated over and over from my parents. "Tough." Perhaps it was an abbreviated version on a phrase "Tough _____" and my parents were sparing me the obscenity or softening the blow. Which I guess would make it a contradictory statement. But anyway, when things weren't going right, when I wasn't happy with a situation, when I had a problem that I wasn't able to solve by myself:

"Tough."

It's a motto that, while it didn't seem to affect me physically, and although I'm still a bit of a non-confrontational person at heart, I still live by. Or at least try to spread to others. Whether it's about "toughening up" or "toughing it out" - society could learn a lot from that brand of parenting and that brand of giving into a situation and making yourself more tough by ACCEPTING it rather than by bitching about it with a stupid rally or protest.

Which is where this topic turns, towards the rallies being held across the nation, but especially here in Chicago. Rallies to debate the controversial lyrics in rap music. Some are here to piss and moan that rap music degrades women and glorifies violence and other naughty things that parents shouldn't want their children to grow up thinking, doing or being in general. Some are here to cry "censorship" for trying to remove words from a language, and more specifically from a music genre. Some are here just because some newly-famous jackass is here and they flock to stupid ideas and anyone spouting them because they have no minds of their own. To all these people, and any others coming to rally for one reason or another:

"Tough."

The system is damned fine the way it is, for the most part. Deal with it.

Rap is riddled with "bad words" and what many call "bad ideas" and "bad beliefs". So? Music has always contained questionable material, and it perseveres. Way back when, don't you think there was some argument going on about women being referred to as "hound dogs" and lying about being "high-class"? That's right, even the King was a bit "misogynistic" - if you want to fall for exaggerations. And what about the racist undertones of "Play that funky music, white boy"? Face it, it's always going to be there. That's the crazy thing about freedom of speech and freedom of thought - it literally takes all kinds.

So after we accept that music can always contain questionable material, it comes down to how it's handled, and by whom. If it's on the radio, it's handled by the FCC. As much as it shouldn't be, that's who it's currently handled by. For decent radio, like this XM satellite radio stuff, which I believe ISN'T under FCC rule - it's handled by the person listening to the radio. George Carlin said it best, "A radio has two knobs, you know. One to turn it off, and one to change the station!" If you don't like it, don't listen to it.

And if you're a parent, claiming you don't have the power to change the station when your child is listening to it without you - you still have the power to instill decency in your child no matter what the radio provides for them. If a song on the radio has more effect on your child's attitude towards women than YOU as a PARENT do - what does that say about your parenting skills? After all, that's what this boils down to. Parents at these rallies want everyone to parent their children EXCEPT THEMSELVES, so they can complain about how crappy their children are behaving and acting. Well guess what, parents?

"Tough."

YOU'VE got to be in charge of your kid, not some rapper. And don't even try to play the "but they look up to them" card - just because I looked up to Superman as a kid doesn't mean I jumped off of buildings trying to fly. My PARENTS sat me down and reminded me that while it all looks cool and Superman's a great guy - I have to obey the laws of gravity. And just because your kid looks up to someone who talks about "shooting bitches" - you have to remind them that they have to obey the laws of the city/state/federal government. Oh, and that they have to obey the laws of decency, too. YOU instill their values and their morals, so THEY can decide to follow it when confronted with rappers and how they treat their bitches.

The music industry does half the battle for you, parents. The radio stations have to censor the cussing themselves, or pick up Radio-Edit versions of the songs. Does that eliminate the potty-talk? Mostly. Does it alter the messages of demeaning women and glorifying violence? Nope. But again, that's where parenting comes in - before the police wind up coming in later on in life.

So where does all of this violence and women-bashing come from? Why is rap music being blamed for trends in society? Because these researchers (and especially pompous douchebags with holier-than-thou attitudes) still can't get it through their skulls that CORRELATION DOES NOT MEAN CAUSATION! Rap music is more offensive to people than ever. Society is more offensive to people than ever. Does that mean rap is to blame for society's ills? Couldn't it also mean that rap's ills are due to society? That since it's cooler and "in" to be shocking and promote violence and sex (sex sells, and it always will) - that's what leads music companies to hire/produce artists with songs portraying just that? I think that's the most likely story. The MARKET and the DOLLAR is what drives the trends, and vice-versa. Society wants more violent video games and is willing to pay - the market makes it happen. Kids would rather shell out money for Parental-Advisory-stickered CDs instead of cleaner rap music that the whole family can enjoy? Then that's what's going to get produced.

Don't get mad at the rappers, get mad at the recording studios willing to produce it to make a profit off your children's skewed value system (I mean AFTER getting mad at yourself for allowing your child to have a skewed value system and the cashflow to affect the marketplace accordingly).

Or as I once heard, "Don't hate the player, hate the game."

Or as my mom used to say:

"Tough."





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Freedoms: Speech and Hatred

Face it, we're being enslaved. Slavery is not at all over - not by a longshot - because none of us are truly free. We cannot do the things we were guaranteed the right to do, challenged by oppressive overseers who try to put us back in our "place" every day.

And here in the city of Chicago, two of this era's greater-ranking oppressors are merging and will be sharing the city's overseeing. I'm speaking, of course, about Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. Now I don't really have as much of a beef with Jackson; he stays out of the newspapers more often than not and is more of a behind-the-scenes kind of guy (as far as I can tell). Or it could just be that he's totally not behind-the-scenes; he's just severely overshadowed by the pompous windbag of oppression known as Al Sharpton.

Use the "n-word" in public (or loudly in the privacy of your own home) and the odds are good that it will travel like a twinge on a spider's web, alerting the beast that it's time to feed and suck the life out of another morsel. Say it on any broadcast waves, and the swarm is akin to a scene in Braveheart. Even now, I can picture Al Sharpton with the half-blue face, shouting:

"They can have cops shoot us! They can lynch us in the streets! They can portray us poorly in the media! But they can NEVER SAY THE N-WORD!!!"

Well guess what, Sharpton? Yes, we can! We have the right to use any word we want, at any time we want, in any place we want!

Oh, I think except for "fire" in a crowded auditorium. I think that's one's actually illegal, because it can get people killed in the ensuing trampling - though saying the WORD isn't illegal, just the result of it is illegal. Or something. It's a slippery slope...

Back to the point: Sharpton and Jackson are both proponents of the "death" of 'the n-word'. They even had a ceremony for its burial and everything. Which was then promptly defiled. It just goes to prove my point: You cannot kill words, and you cannot forbid them to be spoken. If you tried to ban/kill the word "green" - let's say you're against the unholy union of pureblood blues and yellows and you consider it an offense to the color wheel at large - wouldn't you also have to ban the word "verde" ("green" in Spanish)? What about "midori" (Japanese) or "vert" (French) or "зеленый цвет" (Russian)? No matter what words you take away, you can't change the fact that it IS a color and it's the IDEA of that color that creates the words, not the other way around. Removing the "n-word" isn't going to remove the hatred or feelings that lead people to USE that word; you've got the whole thing backwards! Even if you removed the right to say all known forms of the word "green" from every single language, people would have to find new ways to say it or express it. The color remains, and it wouldn't be long before "blellow" (blue-yellow) came into play. Kill it, and you'd get "yellue" (yellow-blue). Kill that, and people might start just calling it a word you couldn't get rid of...

Like "Kermit". Could you really kill off that word, just because it NOW represents some word or idea that you don't like? That's what we're faced with today.

Newer "n-words" are being formed thanks to the destruction and burial of the old one. Now, instead of the "true n-word", some people on the street have switched to "ninja". What are you going to do about that, oppressors Jackson and Sharpton? You can't kill a word that has thousands of years of history completely unrelated to the negative idea you're foolishly trying to hunt down and kill without bothering to try the root of the problem.

And the root of the problem is the hatred. Without the hatred, there'd be no reason to create or use "n-words" of any variety. Words are an expression of feelings and ideas - you can't just treat every instance of a word as just one emotion or feeling or idea being tied to it. One person from the Deep South might use the "n-word" as a way to express outright hatred and loathing for a race of people. One person of that race might use the "n-word" as a way to express a "brotherhood" or connection with other people of that race. Nobody should be allowed to mandate that one usage is associated with all utterances of that word, and no matter if you use it to express brotherhood, comedy, or even the factual (like reading a transcript) - the mandate says it's nothing but hatred and loathing.

That's a load of "BS-word".

No matter what the foolish reason for trying to cut the word down to size, you can't curb the ideas and emotions behind it. Nobody can tell you how to feel or how to think. You have the right to enjoy something or dislike something. That's right, you have the liberty of hatred. You can hold a grudge, form an enemy, even pray for genocide. You can have any idea you choose to be nestled in your head - and even the right to say them out loud and express them. Following through with them, however, is another case entirely. You have the freedom to wish for genocide; you don't have the freedom to put it into action. But that's a rant for another day.

I think I've spoken my peace. Which I am fully entitled to do. I have the freedom of speech. And I have the freedom of hatred towards those who do not respect the freedoms of speech and hatred.

So Mr. Jackson and Mr. Sharpton - keep your wits about you, because I won't be stifled by your oppressive beliefs that words can be "bad". Words are always good, because it's always better to use them than to resort to violence instead. Any good mother can tell you that. The ideas are what you're supposed to be against, not the words expressing them. And unfortunately for you, the ideas in someone else's head are not yours to govern. The best you can hope for is you speak your mind, just as you should let others speak theirs, and hope that in time, your words can sway their minds away from the hatred and loathing that lead them to use their words in ways you don't like.

Until then, we'll just have to agree to disagree - and speak our minds as such.

Which we both have the freedom to do. Read more!