Larry's Phat Page ver. 4.1
Welcome
Me
What's New
Site News
Daily Occurrences
Feedback
Guestbook
Photography
Links
Miscellaneous
Site Help
Contact Me
Highways
Being Gay
What's New in My Life

« PREV    NEXT »

Sat.Dec.18.2004

1:33 am EST        28°F (-2°C) in Fremont, IN

Calendar of Updates

As I promised in yesterday's update, I have returned after midnight to bring up another news item I wanted to mention. (For the entire five-plus-year history of this section, I have had a policy of never exceeding one update in a calendar day; multiple updates on the same calendar day would wreak havoc on the file-naming convention I use here. It does not matter that this update is being made only seven hours after its predecessor; the calendar has flipped forward to the next day.)

Early Friday morning, as my trailer was being unloaded in Cincinnati, OH, I fired up this computer and proceeded to check all of my usual online haunts. In a gay-youth support newsgroup, I came across the story of 18-year-old James Barnett from Dallas, TX. Until earlier this month, James was a senior at Trinity Christian Academy in suburban Addison; however, when another TCA student tipped school administrators off to the existence of James' site My-Boi.com, a gay teen support site, the school expelled James for "supporting an immoral cause." Let me set the following few facts straight: James was not using school computers or any school property, nor was he using his own computer on school grounds, to work on his site. There is no pornographic or otherwise illegal material on the site, and nowhere on it is TCA mentioned. James had been running the site on his own time, using a server that he owned and operated in his parents' house. Yet for some reason, hypocritical so-called "Christians" felt they had the right to remove him from TCA!

I could understand the action that was taken had James been using school property to work on the site, or if he had been found doing something blatantly wrong (i.e., giving another guy head in the school bathroom, or something along that line). As none of that occurred, however, James' rights have been flagrantly and willfully violated by TCA. Among other things, he has grounds for a lawsuit in the violation of his free-speech rights, his freedom of religious exercise rights (no religious school can force its students to observe its brand of "Christianity" except on campus), and his privacy rights (the school principal violated James' explicit request not to out James to his parents; as a legal adult of 18, he does possess that right). While James says on the various web sites he runs that he does not necessariily want to make an example of TCA, I sure as hell hope he does. These people who call themselves "Christians," but act like anything but, need to be stopped — and for that matter, humiliated, crushed, and once and for all defeated. True Christianity demands perfect love for all people, humility, and letting God handle judgment — not intolerance, bigotry, and judgmentalism. Anybody who thinks otherwise will be surprised to learn that the "rapture" will really take them into the lowest levels of hell.

I have been up for over 20 hours consecutively at this point, so it's about time I post this, shut down, and go to bed.