[Hat tip to PerfectStormer who posted about this very topic earlier today]
If the kids of Mona Shores High School in Muskegon, Michigan are a harbinger of the future...I have some hopes that our world is going to get geometrically better and more sane with each passing generation. They had elected one of their friends to be homecoming king, a fellow who happens to be registered as a female with the school system. A transgender teen, honor roll student, and well liked guy was elected by the school body to the honor...
...which of course was stripped away by the school.
Then, last Monday, the principal called him into her office.
"They told me that they took me off, because they had to invalidate all of my votes because I'm enrolled at Mona Shores as a female," Reed said.
Asst. Superintendent Todd Geerlings said the ballot gave two choices: Vote for a boy for king and a girl for queen.
-- Article
And now the kids are raising holy hell.
The school system just sort of walked right into it.
Last weekend I went to the high school homecoming game with my two little boys, my wife an some friends and their kids...it was sort of a perfunctory move on all our parts, figuring the kids would have fun, eat popcorn, wear each other out on the bleachers and we could all meet up after and drink booze while the kids continued to fly around the house in one of those cartoon balls of chaos like when dogs and cats fight.
Anyway...the two year old didn't sit still so I took him for a stroll while the others "watched" the "game." As the two year old tried to find new and innovative ways to kill himself, I bumped into my friend B, and we got to talking...and this was the first I had heard of the issue of the young man who had his Homecoming king title ripped away.
B's daughter and the young man are pals and B had had conversations with the young man about this very topic when he had visited her house. B's daughter was pretty pissed at the school system. B told me about the election...the school turning him away and concocting some BS reason such as he's technically registered as a girl...etc. etc. etc.
And when she told me about this...suddenly some things in the bleachers made sense. Kids all over the darn place were wearing hand printed T-shirts saying "OAK" ...the young man's name.
I wanted to blog about it that very night...
...but I wasn't sure if I should respect the minor's privacy in a national forum. But what the hell. It's reached national news at this point.
The San Francisco Chronicle picked up the story.
And apparently the ACLU is looking into it
The kids created a Facebook page called Oak Is Our King.
I'm pretty proud of these kids.
I'm pretty impressed by this Oak guy.
I'm pretty embarrassed of the high school.
And it's shameful what went on.
But the kids are doing the right thing, dragging the high school through the mud for it. And they deserve it.