The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida and its counterpart in Southern California announced back-to-back victories in Gay-Straight Alliance disputes on both sides of the country this week.
The news comes as Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. signed a bill into law that will throw obstacles in the path of students trying to organize school support clubs in his state. It also falls against the looming backdrop of the U.S.
Supreme Court, where justices will hear arguments in a major student free speech case on Monday, March 19.
In Florida, the Gay-Straight Alliance of Okeechobee High School and student Yasmin Gonzales, sued their school board as well as their principal, Toni Wiersma. The scenario is a familiar one. Gonzales and her classmates jumped through all the hoops required to organize an extra curricular club, including finding a faculty advisor and stating the purpose of the organization. The GSA was designed to promote “tolerance and equality among students, regardless of sexual orientation and/or gender identities through awareness building and education”
Principal Wiersma sat on the proposal for weeks, according to court records, before finally nixing the club in October of last year. The high school policy, she claimed, “does not allow any clubs or organizations which are not related to the standard curriculum.” Considering that the school did, in fact, support many such non-curricular clubs, the students went to court.
The district filed a standard motion to dismiss, which was rejected this week. In a 10-page order, U.S. District Court Judge K. Michael Moore found first that the GSA had standing as an organization to file suit, and second, that the group had a legitimate gripe. The plaintiffs had earlier agreed to drop Toni Wiersma as a defendant, so the suit will proceed against the school district. In a local news piece, the school’s lawyer, David Gibbs, said the objection to the club was to the “premature sexualization of the students. If this had been a heterosexual club, it would have been denied.”
Along with simple hostility towards homosexuality, the idea that a Gay-Straight Alliance is nothing more than an excuse to hang out and talk about sex lies at the heart of official resistance among conservative schools around the country. In California, students have been trying to form a GSA at the Fresno-area Madera High School since the spring of 2005. After nearly two years of getting the runaround, the local ACLU sent a letter to the school board last January, and announced a breakthrough on Wednesday, March 14.
As the ACLU pointed out in its letter to Madera, and every other recalcitrant school district for that matter, federal law requires that public schools provide equal access to non-curricular clubs regardless of viewpoint. With the exception of “the murder club” or some other such dangerous notion, the Equal Access Act demands that schools either allow all non-curricular clubs, or none, the ACLU said.
This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition March 16, 2007