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There are few things that make me roll my eyes with as much disdain as overly entitled teenagers who think the answer to all of life's problems is suing the pants off of the person who dares cross them. And yet, the news that one lesbian teenager has been given the go-ahead by a judge to do just that is like music to my ears. Because nothing screams injustice like a couple of high school coaches calling a kid's mom and yanking her out of the closet. It's the kind of thing that could get a kid killed. Literally.
And yet, that's what coaches Rhonda Fletcher and Cassandra Newell of the Kilgore Independent School District in Texas allegedly did to a girl being identified only as SW. The 16-year-old was still in the closet when her mom says she was confronted by the coaches who claimed the girl was having an affair with an 18-year-old female named Hillary Nutt. The coaches are countering that they were protecting SW from what they considered a legal issue because the girl was 16 and thought to be dating a legal adult.
That sounds good, doesn't it? As a mom, you'd want to know when an adult was messing with your little one, right? Only it just so happens Nutt is Newell's ex-girlfriend, and Texas law actually allows for a three-year age difference between sexual partners when a minor is involved.
Take that legal issue out of the equation, and what right does a parent have to know her kid's sexual orientation ... unless the child wants to share it? Don't our kids deserve to have some secrets from us, some private thoughts?
I can't say that I wouldn't want to know if my kid was a lesbian. I would so I could support my child, but see, I'm a nice, sane, normal parent.
Unfortunately, I'm not the only kind out there. Unfortunately, there are also parents like the dad who was mad that his daughter was a lesbian, so he went and killed both the daughter's girlfriend and the girlfriend's mom, leaving his daughter alone with the dead bodies just to torture her. Or the parents of one of the quarter of gay teens kicked out of their homes for coming out.
In America, it's still dangerous for gay kids to come out because they're at an age when they're dependent on their parents, and too many parents are still stuck in the dark ages. For a school to cross that line means they have to take the responsibility for what could have happened to a kid like SW. Just think, if your kid were kicked out of a school and forced to walk home on a dangerous highway, you'd sue because they were put in danger.
So why not now? SW is OK. Her mom seems to have taken this well. But she has an opportunity here to really make a difference. If she successfully sues Kilgore and these coaches, maybe other school officials will finally realize that teenagers have rights too, that kids should have ultimate control over their own thoughts and feelings, not parents. And maybe it will remind us, the parents, that if we want our kids to talk to us about this stuff, we have to prove we are worth talking to.
Do you think kids are too sue-happy nowadays? What about this girl?
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