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No. 14586
ID: e12142
>>14580
>Rather than settling this through public discourse, changing hearts and minds, etc, the tool of choice is lawyers and a courtroom. All that creates is resentment and makes the situation worse.
Well, when you know that threatening a lawsuit is a good way to shut someone up, and 99% of the time people are going to back down because of what a lawsuit means (a loss, sometimes massive, of time and money that could be better used elsewhere), then OF COURSE using the threat of a lawsuit is going to seem like the better option. Why talk things through with someone who has an opposing viewpoint when you can shut them up by threatening to sue? Sure, it's stupid - but it's effective, and to many people, that's all that matters.
(And by the way, it wasn't a lawsuit from parents that shut the event down; the school board shut it down after the ACLU threatened to sue to allow the girl to go to the prom - like, y'know, she should have been allowed to in the first place - because the homophobes figured that if they didn't have a prom for her to go to, the ACLU would have no basis to sue.)
All this situation is doing is "criminalizing" homosexuality (in a sense) and making other gay students afraid to come out and be themselves, since they could now conceivably become targets of angry Bible-thumping jackasses.
The school district was in a tough spot, but like Sechs said, doing the right thing isn't easy or cheap, and they sure as bloody hell didn't do the right thing in this situation.
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