WASHINGTON STATE HIGH SCHOOL
CANCELS ANTI-GAY BASHING PLAY

From KIMA TV courtesy of Orcinus:

Prescott and several drama club students decided to do the Laramie Project last month at the start of the school year. It's a play about the aftermath of a young Laramie, Wyoming man brutally murdered by two men for being gay.

But soon after, controversy erupted in the high school's community with students, their parents and even staff.

"When I read the play I didn't have a similar reaction," said Lee Maras, principal of Davis High School. "But the ones I did talk to didn't even want to read it, didn't even want to look at it - just felt it was inappropriate for our school."

Click here for the rest.

Since when is opposition to brutality controversial? Only when you hate the victims of such violence, I suppose. I've never seen The Laramie Project, but it has a great reputation--they even did it here at LSU a few years back, and everyone involved seemed to have a great experience with it. My understanding is that there's really nothing controversial about it; it's not even particularly pro-gay. But producing it at a high school, one of the final frontiers of rampant American homophobia, creates a situation such that public education's true purposes become obvious.

If this school was really concerned with education, there would simply be no question about performing the play, controversy be damned. But the job of public school administrators is to make sure that the wheels of the authority indoctrination machine keep moving while making it appear as though children are learning. Because the quasi-governmental nature of the school system makes everybody with a cause think they have a say in what's happening in the schools, a big part of keeping the machine functioning is playing public relations games. This school's principal sounds genuinely sympathetic to the play's message, but his job dictates that he keep all controversies minimal: consequently, PR trumps educational concerns, and that's okay because authority indoctrination, schools' main thrust, not only doesn't suffer, it is actually enhanced by arbitrarily ordering these thespians around.

This is all no surprise to me, especially after my six years inside the machine as a theater teacher, myself. Still sucks, though.

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