Father-daughter dances banned in R.I. as 'gender discrimination'

Submitted by Matt on Thu, 2012-09-20 01:36

Article here. Excerpt:

'Father-daughter dances and mother-son ballgames -- those cherished hallmarks of Americana -- have been banned in a Rhode Island school district after they were targeted by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The ACLU, the self-proclaimed guardian of the nation's liberty, says such events violate the state's gender-discrimination law. The organization challenged their existence following a complaint from a single mom who said her daughter was prevented from attending a father-daughter dance in the Cranston Public Schools district.

The story has created a furor both online as well as in Cranston, a community located south of Providence and considered one of the safest places in America.'

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Comments

Really? I don't remember any of that stuff when I was in high school, and this was at a private, religious school in the deep south. If any such cheesy traditions had existed then I'm sure my school would have been into it.

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Submitted by fibtastic on Thu, 2012-09-20 22:45

Yeah I didn't have that in my school either. We had the one where the girls ask the guys in high school but as I recall no one really followed that rule because in reality that's an area I think people who were my age at the time had already gotten over enough that girls had been asking guys already.

Anyways from reading this story elsewhere, the state screwed up by not including an exemption that the federal law they copied included. The school could have easily accommodated people without 'ruining the tradition'. Inflexibility never accomplishes anything and leads to us having to rely on literal readings of the law.

And it was resolved for a simple reason: the school district recognized that in the 21st Century, public schools have no business fostering the notion that girls prefer to go to formal dances while boys prefer baseball games.

Whoever issued this opinion 'gets it' and pointed out the often missing element of stereotypes affecting boys. Nice to see.

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Submitted by ItsDan on Fri, 2012-09-21 11:35