High School Students Using the Word GAY!

Earlier this month former Santa Rosa high-school student Rebekah Rice finally spoke out in court about things being gay.

Five years ago, the then 14-year old was taunted for her Mormon upbringing when fellow classmates asked her if she had (like) ten moms. Drawing on the cool lingo of the day, Rice retorted, "That's so gay."

Evidently this phrase landed her smack dab in the middle of a high-stakes lawsuit, in which school officials claim that such language harms the fragile foundation of gay-rights. Arguing that gay students need more protection than, say, a young girl getting ganged up on by a cohort of anti-Mormon mongrels, lawyers for the school have proposed a ban on the expression: "The district has a statutory duty to protect gay students from harassment . . . prohibition of the phrase 'That's so gay' ... was a reasonable regulation."

What's next? Will we get sued for calling obese people fat, or for laughing at dumb blonde jokes? Will the heterosexuals have to pay reparations to all the eons of emotional suffering our great-great-great grannies and granddads inflicted on the in-the-closet population?

Well, I want my scholarship for Canadian-Americans with green eyes and crooked teeth, dammit. And some financial payback for all the ancestral single women who've given birth over the millennia and never received one red cent of child support! I mean, where are all my vertically challenged, dirty blonde headed, freckle-eared, had chicken pox once reparations?

Well, too bad for me: I just wasn't born with a skin color or behavioral tendency that the government recognizes or rewards.

But back to the real children.

We all know that kids can be cruel. And a lot of the time, they have no idea why. They pick up words that adults throw around nonchalantly, like dogs licking up scraps under a dining table. The context often gets lost in the translation from the literal to the expressive, and novice tongues do not discriminate on the basis of tastefulness - or lack thereof.

How can we expect children to behave when we are the ones setting the standard? We are the audience that tunes into the bizarre-o world of Hollywood misfits; the adults are the ratings boosters that encourage the media and marketers to regurgitate the same smut and small-minded gibberish that we tell our kids is "bad behavior." But have we learned nothing from our own youth? We knew everything back then, especially when we weren't supposed to; trying to keep kids away from "adult only" only makes them want to dabble in the dark side all the more.

Now I understand that slander and bigotry is an ugly beast. No one likes being teased for things that they cannot help - things that they are born with. Racial and/or gender slurs only strengthen the stupidity and ignorance that people like Borat point and laugh at. Do we want the whole world to laugh at us because we're so undisciplined with our words that we actually make them illegal?

We are a country born on the basis of freedom, namely, freedom of speech. But with freedom comes great responsibility, or as Nietzsche put it: "Freedom is the will to be responsible to ourselves." Having a choice means being able to make the wisest, most beneficial of them, or to make the meanest, most harmful one. You can use your words to improve society, or you can use them to incur hate and shame - it's your choice.

But the more people that choose to abuse their freedom with "skinist" or sexist slurs, the more stupid laws we as taxpayers pay to implement, or pay to break. It's like that kid in grade school that cut class with the bathroom pass and forced everyone else to wait until recess. Essentially, the idiot that can't use his or her freedom responsibly is the one who makes everyone pay. And freedom should remain free, don't you agree?

This mania to censor everything not "politically correct" is getting out of control. To ban a phrase because it makes people sensitive is uncomfortably close to fascist fanaticism, and if it is enacted into law, we might as well get a head start on burning our books. Yet, there must be some agreement on the appropriateness of certain kinds of language if our vastly different cultural/familial/religious/sexual oriented ideologies are to work together. I'm pretty sure that if we talked openly about the effects of mean-spirited words, the allure of these phrases would diminish. But it has got to take place on all spectrums - adults cannot claim exclusivity on expletives unless they expect children to eagerly use them as soon as mommy and daddy leave the playground. And similarly, if black people continue to refer to themselves with the infamous "n" word, then they should either get used to hearing it from everyone, or become the change they want to see in society.

If you don't agree, well sue me.