Remember Dakota Ary? He was the teenager disciplined by Western Hills High School last year after a teacher overheard him telling another student that “homosexuality is wrong.”
He and his mom filed a lawsuit against the district, criticized the media and lots of gay rights groups, and generally got pissed off at the violation of his “First Amendment rights.” They raised such a fuss that the school reduced his three-day suspension to a few hours of in-school detention.
Now young Dakota Ary and mother Holly Ary have made a video with the National Organization for Marriage, a group formed in 2007 with the specific purpose of battling same-sex marriage in California.
The organization’s controversial tactics include pitting African-Americans and Latinos against gays in order to prevent laws allowing same-sex marriage.
The teacher who sent Dakota to the principal’s office, Kristopher Franks, was actually suspended and investigated by the district shortly after the incident in September 2011. Franks was later cleared of any wrongdoing. To be clear, it was the school principals, not Franks, who chose to suspend Dakota.
In the video, Dakota and his mother say they were already suspicious of the teacher because Franks had placed a magazine photo of two men kissing on a classroom wall. And it’s not just gay kissing that shouldn’t be shown in classrooms, but any kissing at all.
“It would be just like if you put a Cosmopolitan magazine up on the wall,” Holly said. “You don’t want to put a picture of man and woman kissing, either, especially in a high school classroom.”
The small incident became a national story and the teenager and his mom protest their treatment under the spotlight.
“Dakota is not a bigot. He is not someone who hates gay people,” Holly says in the video. “He’s not a hater in any way. And of all these organizations and companies that promote gay marriage and so on and so forth, for them to come back at him as a child is just ridiculous. I’m extremely proud of the fact that he did stand up for himself.”
The only thing that’s certain about what happened here: Schools have no idea how to handle homosexuality when it comes up in the classroom, either from curious students or hostile ones.
4 hours not spent learning? I’m so sure that was his main concern. Having gone to Western Hills, and hell, being a teenager before, that missing 4 hours of education is not why he is pissed. He is pissed that someone fought back against his narrow-mindedness and anti-gay attitude.
It’s funny how his family is preaching free speech, but at the same time condemning having non-straight imagery in the class. Imagery is a form of speech. But that isn’t important to them because he goes against their ideals.
Now, I will agree that if the photo was up “just because”, and not for any educational purpose, then it shouldn’t have remained up. The same going for any other sexual/intimate images, straight, gay, or otherwise.
Religious people need to stop acting like they are so discriminated against. They aren’t being beat up at school, dragged into the streets and lynched, and being told they will burn for all eternity. They need to realize that freedom of religion also means freedom FROM religion, and that this “persecution” is just people fighting back against their bigotry and backwards ways.
Saying that homosexuality is wrong is like telling someone that being a Jew or Islamic is wrong, or that they are going to hell for having red hair. Would the school administration be wrong for trying to curb such antisocial behavior then?
you can tell a chromosome or two is/are missing from this kid-funny, in my school in CA, this kid would have been beaten up daily for that hair
Compton is a tough place, very, very anti-gay.
Dakota is an honor student. But lies are your stock in trade, aren’t they?
If he has any brains at all he is someday going to be very ashamed of this. But the record will always be there on the Internet and will haunt him. What a tool.