Good writing keeps you reading. Remin Setoodeh's fascinating cover story in Newsweek kept me reading. The question implied by the piece is whether school policies regarding "diversity," "tolerance," and "sensitivity" backfired so horribly in Oxnard, California that a young homosexual was murdered as an indirect result of them. Like the Matthew Shepard case, Newsweek's cover story would be an item of local interest had the victim not been a homosexual. Leaving aside the obvious agenda of those pushing this murder as opposed to any of the 17,000 others that will occur (and won't make it into even a blurb in Newsweek) in the U.S. this year, it is still the case that this story is heartbreaking and engrossing.

On February 12, fourteen-year-old Brandon McInerney shot fifteen-year-old Larry King in the back of the head in history class following a series of unwanted advances by King, including a courtside plea from King to McInerney to "be his valentine" during a pickup basketball game. The embarassment continued for McInerney, as his friends taunted him that he and King would make "gay babies."

Faculty encouraged King's flamboyant behavior. To junior high, he wore stiletto heels and glittery makeup, signed papers as "Leticia," and made sexually suggestive comments to male students. Although a teacher ordered Larry to remove a Playboy-bunny necklace because she deemed it offensive to women, administrators did little to discourage King's bizarre dress, conduct, and appearance. When one teacher told King to wash off his eyeliner and lipstick, the school's assistant principlal overruled him. "She started to confuse her role as a junior-high principal," King's adoptive father contends. "I think that she was asserting her beliefs for gay rights." Another assistant principal emailed staff: "We have a student on campus who has chosen to express his sexuality by wearing make-up. It is his right to do so. Some kids are finding it amusing, others are bothered by it. As long as it does not cause classroom disruptions he is within his rights. We are asking that you talk to your students about being civil and non-judgmental. They don't have to like it but they need to give him his space. We are also asking you to watch for possible problems. If you wish to talk further about it please see me or Ms. Epstein." One English teacher actually bought Larry a green evening dress.

Why is it the right of a junior high student "to express his sexuality" in school? There are ways of teaching tolerance of our differences. This school didn't do that. The school encouraged a troubled boy to flaunt his sexuality around other boys, a few of them troubled as well, in a manner that only someone completely devoid of common sense would not envision leading to conflict. Sex is a powerful thing--too powerful for students in junior high. Boys dressing as girls is a classroom distraction. Every day is not Halloween. Students have rights, but schools should have rules and responsibilities as well. The notion that aggressively pushing a lifestyle as controversial as homosexuality or transvestitism to junior high students will suddenly transform confused and hormonally-charged teenagers into paragons of tolerance is faulty. They are too young to handle this as maturely as their teachers wish and student bodies are too diverse--in the accurate sense, not the newspeak sense--to uniformly accept such lifestyles. It creates a false sense of security within kids like Larry King and injects issues too difficult to handle for troubled teens like Brandon McInerney. By serving an agenda rather than kids, then, this junior high failed two of its students.

E.O. Green Junior High didn't murder Larry King. Brandon McInerney did. And even had Larry King come to school in a woman's bikini every day, he would not be deserving of a shove or a punch, let alone two bullets to the back of the head. Alas, the school was educating several hundred teenagers and not a group as respectful of quirks as a Libertarian Party convention. It was utopian for school administration to allow their wishes for how teenage boys should act (and react), rather than the reality of how teenage boys do act, to dictate school policy.

Following King's murder, California assemblyman Mike Eng introduced a bill mandating diversity training in public schools. "We need to teach young people that there's a curriculum called tolerance education that should be in every school," Eng explained. "We should teach young people that diversity is not something to be assaulted, but diversity is something that needs to be embraced because diversity makes California the great state that it is." Eng, as liberals are wont to do, gleaned the wrong lesson. Aggressively pushing sexuality in middle schools leads to trouble, not tolerance. Larry King, rest in peace.

When I was a junior high school student, back in the day, a capacity for embarrassment would likely have been sufficient to constrain Larry King from 'expressing himself' in this manner, and the rough and tumble social dynamic with other young men (and the scorn of the girls) would have done the rest of the work. I imangine it is still that way most places; this tale sounds very peculiar.

His fate is exceedingly sad. Youth is the time one learns proper conduct, manners, self-control, dignity, and the like. Your father teaches you, your peers teach you, and even (in some measure) those acting in loco parentis teach you. Youth is also a time when young men are habituated to challenges; there is a limit to which the adult world can contain and adjudicate the disputes of the young without stunting their development. One might speculate about the degree to which Larry King was unreachable and the degree to which his preceptors had crapped out.

We can see what the school officialdom were up to and now this state legislator as well: a redefinition of manners, of paradigmatic conduct in relations between men, of what someone coming into their manhood should emulate and strive for; one cannot help suspect that those who carry themselves poorly would like to abolish the standards to which they have trouble adhering.

If it were a heterosexual boy flaunting his sexuality and harrassing an uninterested _female_ student like this he would have been (rightly) stopped and punished instead of encouraged by his educators.

This sounds more like a case of a school so afraid of being sued that they allowed something to go on they shouldn't have,(the boy dressing in women's clothing etc...) and the poor boy ended up murdered because of it.

He ended up murdered because somebody shot him.

However, he was in an ongoing conflict with his assailant that he initiated and continued, perhaps because of innate wilfullness but also because he was getting positive feedback from figures in authority and the general kultursmog. It is a sign of the times that this young man's deficits of good breeding, with its highly eccentric manifestations and severly disproportionate price, is not regarded as problematic at all by the vice principal or the state legislator in question. It is their view that it be added to the state's school curriculum that we all take a benign view of such behavior. Imitatio Quentin Crisp is their preferred ethic.

Homosexuality must be a terribly difficult thing to deal with psychologically, and a 15 year old boy is not quite equipt. His elders' job is to foster maturity, not immaturity, as they seemed to do here. The killer, a 14 year old boy, with all the social awkwardness and pressures of high school life, also must have been too immature to deal with the situation, especially without realistic guidance (telling him to be tolerant hardly seems realistic when a boy is sexually harrassing him in front of his friends). It seems to have led him into a tragically misguided attempt to be manly.

Leftist utopianism meets original sin, once again.

Let's be real: homosexuality is an aberration. Like it or not it is not the norm, no matter how much the PC police want to allow for their opinion that it is.

However, it's real and it's here as another kind of human behavior and for that it should be understood. And I would accept that most thinking people do.

But in recent years, the Gay Mafia has infected society with the idea that it's a perfectly normal thing to do to the extent that gays can get away with things that heterosexuals would be scorned or prosecuted for.

In a very real sense, they and the people who condone and support their kind of over the top behavior in public, especially when it's extremely offensive, have layed the groupwork for what happened to this kid.

Sad but true.

"Leftist utopianism meets original sin."

Well said. The entire case can be distilled to this.

Brandon's Defense Fund
http://brandonsdefense.com/

Brandon's Defense Fund
http://brandonsdefense.com/

I have the same reaction as Xantippe, I think that neither I nor the school would like straight boys "expressing their sexuality".

Would wearing sweatshirts like other boys be considered "expressing sexuality"? Sounds like wearing clothes, to me. So how would straight kids "express their sexuality"? What is left that is permissible?

That would be the point Sea King: straight boys aren't encouraged to express their sexuality. Nor should they be and that's ok. But, in some schools gay kids are encouraged and for those who take it seriously and feel omnipotent because they are supported by a faculty and administration that have a leftist agenda, are in some cases, unfortunately, targets.

If the government schools just stuck to education and making sure the kids concentrated on just that, there wouldn't be as many of these kinds of problems.

How is "wearing make-up" expressing your sexuality. Other than a few drag queens, I know no gay men who wear make-up.

Also why would this principal encourage "expressing your sexuality"? What does this have to do with learning?