Local Anti-Gay Christianist Bigotry in Portsmouth Virginia

Just when I begin to think that perhaps things are changing for the better in this area for those of us in the LGBT community, a story like this one pops up and shows that prejudice and discrimination are still very wide spread. As 365gay.com is reporting (http://www.365gay.com/Newscon07/12/122007school.htm), a 17 year old lesbian student was suspended from I. C. Norcom High School in Portsmouth, Virginia - i.e., right across the river from Norfolk - for wearing a t-shirt featuring a lesbian pride symbol. I suspect NOTHING would have been said if she had been wearing a t-shirt with Christian imagery on it or something promoting an anti-gay rapper. In my view, if the teacher involved cannot handle exposure to LGBT students, she needs to resign and find a job with one of the numerous wingnut, bible-thumping Christian schools in the area. I hope the American Civil Liberties Union keeps up the pressure on the school and the school board. Here are some story highlights:

(Portsmouth, Virginia) The American Civil Liberties Union on Friday demanded that a high school that punished a student for wearing a t-shirt featuring a lesbian pride symbol apologize to the student and guarantee that it will no longer illegally censor her in the future. School officials at I.C. Norcom High School had threatened the 17-year-old senior with suspension because a teacher was upset by her t-shirt, which had an image of two overlapping female gender symbols.

“When my teacher told me she wanted me to turn my shirt inside-out or cover it up, I was confused, because I’ve worn that shirt to school several times before and nobody ever said a word about it,” said Bethany Laccone, who attends a different school full-time but goes to Norcom High every morning for a hotel management class. “I wear that shirt because I want people to know that I’m proud of being a lesbian and comfortable with who I am. And I have the same Constitutional right to free speech as any other student.”

In a letter sent to I.C. Norcom High School officials this morning, the ACLU demanded that any mention of the censorship be removed from Laccone’s student record, that the school guarantee it would not illegally censor Laccone or other students in the future, and that the school apologize to Laccone for its actions. “What’s happening to Bethany Laccone is a clear-cut case of unconstitutional censorship,” said Kent Willis, Executive Director of the ACLU of Virginia.

Laccone says that on December 10 she was pulled out of class by a teacher who said she shouldn’t be wearing the shirt at school and then sent her to the assistant principal’s office. The assistant principal and the teacher then told Laccone that the shirt violated a section of the school dress code that bans “bawdy, salacious or sexually suggestive messages.”

In a later meeting with Laccone’s father, the assistant principal said that he was upholding the censorship, and added that because the teacher is “very conservative” she claimed she was so upset by the t-shirt that it “interfered with her ability to teach.” “A public school teacher’s job is to serve the needs of all the students who go to that school,” said Christine Sun, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s national Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Project. “If a teacher can’t deal with the fact that there are gay students in her classroom, that doesn’t mean she gets to violate that student’s First Amendment rights.”