This Week in the Mercury
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
LGBTQI-Z Outing the Bullies
Posted by Dan Savage on Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 1:29 PM
Running out the door, tossing this up quickly, but this is amazing and awesome and amazingly awesomely amazing:
The Chillicothe Gazette and Columbus Dispatch report that 15-year-old Zach Huston was getting bullied at Unioto High School in Ohio for being openly gay. When he reported this to school authorities, they refused to help, saying he should change his own behavior to attract less attention and that bullying was simply what he should expect from a school full of "Bible-beaters." Then he was brutally attacked, and a classmate caught the beating on video. Now the ACLU has sent a letter to the school asking school officials to meet with them to discuss better anti-bullying policies—if they refuse to do so, the ACLU will sue. James Hardiman, legal director for the ACLU of Ohio, says, "It's not enough to have a policy on paper. The policy must have meaning—it must have teeth. [...] Having a policy in place and not enforcing it is tantamount to not having a policy at all."It also appears, sadly, that reporting bullying to parents and authorities isn't always enough. Nobody believed 15-year-old Julio Artuz that his teacher was verbally abusing him, so he took a cell phone video that revealed the teacher's repeated insults and threats. And school administrators said 14-year-old Cheyanne was lying about her teachers' bullying — until she captured their cruel comments on tape.
Yes, yes, yes! More at Jezebel.
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