Pine Belt Progressive

A while ago, I wrote that you have to tell stories if you want to win an ideological struggle. Fake Consultant, who writes at Left in Alabama, is quickly becoming one of my favorite storytellers in the blogosphere. I find Fake Consultant’s peculiar combination of laid-back style, wit, and ability to make good points very pleasing. Over the weekend, F.C. had a great story about some goings-on at a high school during the annual Day of Silence.

In my little corner of the world, the plain fact is that it’s probably a lot easier to remain closeted than it is to deal daily with the little taunts and jabs that come your way—and of course for some, there’s the risk that they might end up like Matthew Shepard…a man who ended up out and dead.

There has been a reaction to that reality in high schools, which is why we are today visiting the public spaces just off the campus of Mt. Si High School in Snoqualmie, Washington (home of the Wildcats), where a local church group will be arriving to protest the school’s annual “Day of Silence”, an effort to acknowledge the pressures placed on the school’s gay population.

Displayed among the various protesters today was fear, ignorance, disingenuousness, and a strange mixture of self-righteousness and homoeroticism…and that was just among the people in the church group.

Were minds changed?
Did anyone make a new friend?
And how do Dr. Martin Luther King and the Pledge of Allegiance fit into the picture?
Follow along, and we shall see.

If you like the story, you can find more at of F.C.’s work here.

Bonus: PortlyDyke has a great post about an experiment ABC did in which they had gay couples display affection for one another in public. One passerby called 911and reported two men kissing on a park bench, and the police actually sent an officer to investigate!