An open letter to Woodlan High School Principal Edwin Yoder:
Dear Mr. Yoder - Do you like apples? Hold that thought. I read, with great interest, this article detailing your actions following the publication of a column by sophomore Megan Chase. Seems that you weren't happy with the piece, calling it inappropriate and reprimanding the school's journalism teacher for allowing the students to run it without your approval. (It's interesting that you chose to allow a piece on teen pregnancy to run in a previous issue, but a piece calling for straight students to be tolerate of GLBT students was "inappropriate.")
This pissed me off, for a number of reasons. I was thinking of a snarky rant about close-minded conservative homophobes holding positions of authority in public schools, and how sad it is that such ass-backward moralists hold sway over impressionable kids who need to hear from their peers that hate is not OK. But then I thought, gee, what would really piss you off? And it hit me, the time-honored way of dealing with people like you, who gain such satisfaction over muzzling the voices of people whose opinions don't conform to your own.
There are, according to this site, 728 students at Woodlan. Ms. Chase's article was presumably read by some of them. Strollerderby gets - best guess here - a few thousand hits a day. And a few hundred websites link to this one, meaning that there's the potential for several thousand additional readers to click on a particular piece. Ms. Chase's column - very appropriate for kids of any age, in my opinion, and a nicely written one at that - is printed in full in the article. And we Godless gay-lovin' liberal parent bloggers, we do love linking to stories about bigots who try to impose their narrow-minded beliefs upon those who have little choice in the matter. So rather than quash her piece, as you intended, you've given Ms. Chase a very, very large audience. So I'll rephrase the question from paragraph one. How 'bout them apples?
