'Cross-Dressing' Out, Camouflage In
HOUSTON (Reuters) - Camouflage was in and cross-dressing was out at a rural East Texas school district after a Christian legal group complained a long-standing school tradition of reversing social roles for a day would promote homosexuality.
Students in Spurger, Texas were encouraged by school officials to wear camouflage hunting gear to class on Wednesday after they called off their annual "TWIRP Day" in which boys dressed as girls and vice versa.
The cross-dressing tradition began some years back as a kind of Sadie Hawkins Day where girls ask boys to go out on dates.
TWIRP stands for "The Woman Is Requested To Pay."
But Delana Davies, who has two children in the Spurger school, complained this year that the tradition could promote homosexuality and got the Liberty Legal Institute, a right-wing Christian legal group, to take up the cause.
"It might be fun today to dress up like a little girl -- kids think it's cute and things like that. And you start playing around with it and, like drugs, you do a little here and there (and) eventually it gets you," Davies told reporters.
"It is outrageous that a school in a small town in east Texas would encourage their 4-year-olds to be cross-dressers," institute litigation director Hiram Sasser said.
He sought and obtained permission from the district for the woman's children to stay out of school for the day.
School attorney Tanner Hunt told Reuters the Liberty group misrepresented TWIRP Day and made it sound sinister when it has always been innocent fun.
"I guarantee you nobody on the school board or in the administration ever had that cross their minds," Hunt said of the "cross-dressing" reference.
Sasser said it was not his intent to disparage the school.
"The district gets mad every time I say 'cross-dress,' but I don't know what other way to describe it," he told Reuters.
Because of the controversy, school officials decided to change Wednesday from TWIRP Day to Camouflage Day, in what Hunt described as a reference to the clothing hunters wear during deer-hunting season, which is going on now and is enormously popular in rural Texas.
Despite the change from TWIRP Day, Hunt said some of the students stuck to the old tradition and wore clothes of the opposite sex.
"I understand from the superintendent that some of the boys dressed in pink shorts anyway," he said.
We have a lot of ignorance to combat in this country. Sometimes I forget how deep that ignorance and hatred runs.
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