School has to pay Constance $82K

The school that kept Constance from prom has been ordered to pay her legal bills.

Cardinal: Catholic schools welcome kids of gays – but priest made OK call

(Boston) Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley on Wednesday defended a priest who denied admission to a parish school to a gay couple’s child, calling it a pastoral decision and saying the priest had his “full confidence and support.”

O’Malley’s comments on his blog were his first public remarks about the decision earlier this month by St. Paul Elementary School in Hingham to rescind the boy’s acceptance because his parents are lesbians.

A parent of the boy said the Rev. James Rafferty, the parish priest at St. Paul’s, said her relationship was “in discord” with church teachings, which sees marriage as only between a man and a woman. She said the principal told her teachers wouldn’t be prepared to handle the boy’s questions when he realized the church’s view of family conflicted with what he saw at home. The parent spoke to The Associated Press but asked not to be named to protect the welfare of the child.

The decision prompted calls for O’Malley to intervene. The Catholic Schools Foundation, which O’Malley chairs, said the decision was at odds with Gospel teaching, and it wouldn’t fund schools that made similar decisions.

The archdiocese’s head of education later called the parent, apologized and offered to help the 8-year-old enroll in another Catholic school.

O’Malley said Rafferty had come under “undue criticism” for the decision.

“He made a decision about the admission of the child to St. Paul School based on his pastoral concern for the child,” O’Malley wrote. “I can attest personally that Father Rafferty would never exclude a child to sanction the child’s parents.”

The archdiocese said it is creating a policy to clarify its schools don’t bar children with same-sex parents.

“It is true that we welcome people from all walks of life,” O’Malley wrote. “But we recognize that, regardless of the circumstances involved, we maintain our responsibility to teach the truths of our faith, including those concerning sexual morality and marriage.”

O’Malley began his post with a recollection about meeting the young daughter of a murdered woman who had run a brothel while he was bishop in the West Indies. He said the woman’s daughter had left public school because she was being badly taunted, and he immediately directed that the girl be admitted to the local Catholic school.

“Catholic schools exist for the good of the children and our admission standards must reflect that,” he wrote. “We have never had categories of people who were excluded.”

The Hingham case was similar to a situation in Boulder, Colo., in which a Catholic school said two children of lesbian parents could not re-enroll because of their parents’ sexual orientation, and the Denver Archdiocese backed the decision.

“It is clear that all of their school policies (in Denver) are intended to foster the welfare of the children and fidelity to the mission of the Church,” O’Malley wrote. “Their positions and rationale must be seriously considered.”

ACLU files suit against school

After being sent to a fake prom, Constance is seeking monetary damages from her school district.

Gay teens attend prom just fine

Students rally against Georgia prom decision

Although Georgia high school student Derrick Martin has the okay from school officials to bring his boyfriend to prom, not all his fellow students agree with the move. In fact, some students organized a protest.

Protest organizer Amber Duskin, a senior at Bleckley County High School, sent text messages to her fellow students on Wednesday asking them to show up, according to the Macon Telegraph.

[1]

“I don’t believe in going up there and dancing with gay guys like that,” she told the newspaper. “It’s also not just him bringing a boy. It was bringing all this attention to it.”

And his parents, who dislike the media attention, kicked him out of the house. He is currently staying with friends. Ironically, Martin’s father is a math teacher at Bleckley County High and is the school’s Teacher of the Year.

Martin said Thursday the school is considering abandoning the traditional “walk-through” where couples are announced as they enter the dance. He also said some students discussed having a separate prom.

[1] http://www.365gay.com/wp-content/uploads/news-gay-prom-guys-top.jpg

ACLU sues prom-cancelling school

A school that cancelled prom to keep lesbians out is being sued by the ACLU.

Prom canceled to keep lesbian out

In order to keep from changing its straight-only policy, a Miss. school cancelled prom.

Sign petition for Miss. lesbian student barred from prom

Change.org started an online petition Friday in support of a Mississippi teen who sought to go to prom with her girlfriend. School board members decided to cancel prom instead of allow the lesbian student to attend with a same-sex date. On Thursday, the American Civil Liberties union, on behalf of …

ACLU demands Miss. high school allow lesbian at prom

Constance McMillen, a Mississippi high school, wants to go to prom. But school district officials seem to be making that dream a little difficult.

Itawamba County School District officials told McMillan she may not arrive at prom with her girlfriend, that she may not wear a tuxedo, and that should other …

‘Two-Track’ Church Suggested by Archbishop of Canterbury

PARIS — The Most Rev. Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, said profound differences among the world’s 77 million Anglicans over gay clergy and same-sex unions could divide their church into a “two-track model” yielding “two styles of being Anglican.”

The formula could avert a formal breach between liberals and conservatives but bring new strains in the relationship between the global Anglican Communion and American Episcopalians who resolved this month to open the door to ordaining openly gay bishops and to start the process of developing rites for same-sex marriages.

Archbishop Williams insisted that the issue should not be debated “in apocalyptic terms of schism and excommunication but plainly as what they are — two styles of being Anglican.”

In a lengthy message published Monday on his Web site, the archbishop offered a detailed and nuanced response to events at the Episcopal convention in Anaheim, Calif., this month when gay-rights advocates in the United States chalked up major victories over conservatives on sexual issues. The Episcopal Church is the official branch of the Anglican Communion in the United States.

The developments were seen by liberals and conservatives as likely turning points in the history of the divided Episcopal Church, reflecting the profound rifts over sexual issues within Anglicanism — the world’s third largest network of Christian churches after the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches. The differences have crystallized around the Episcopal Church’s consent in 2003 to the consecration of the church’s first openly gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire.

The Episcopalians had agreed to a moratorium on the election of gay bishops, but it was lifted at the convention in Anaheim.

The archbishop of Canterbury is the spiritual head of the Anglican Communion, which is composed of 38 provinces worldwide. The Episcopal Church claims about 2.3 million members.

In his message, Archbishop Williams repeated his view that “a blessing for a same-sex union cannot have the authority” of the full Anglican Communion, any more than a blessing for a heterosexual couple living outside marriage would have.

That, in turn, means that as long as the broader church “as a whole does not bless same-sex unions, a person living in such a union cannot without serious incongruity have a representative function in a Church whose public teaching is at odds with their lifestyle.”

The issues have confronted the archbishop with deep divisions not simply between liberals and conservatives in the United States but also across the broader church with its many followers in Africa, Britain and elsewhere. Four conservative dioceses in the United States and many individual Episcopal churches have broken away from the national denomination to forge alliances with conservative Anglican groups such as the Anglican Church of Nigeria.

Archbishop Williams said: “There is at least the possibility of a twofold ecclesial reality in view in the middle distance: that is, a ‘covenanted’ Anglican global body, fully sharing certain aspects of a vision of how the Church should be and behave, able to take part as a body in ecumenical and interfaith dialogue; and, related to this body, but in less formal ways with fewer formal expectations, there may be associated local churches in various kinds of mutual partnership and solidarity with one another and with ‘covenanted’ provinces.”

The archbishop has promoted the idea of covenant — described by some analysts as a kind of good-behavior guide for churches — to overcome the rift.

“This has been called a ‘two-tier’ model, or, more disparagingly, a first- and second-class structure,” the archbishop’s message said. “But perhaps we are faced with the possibility rather of a ‘two-track’ model, two ways of witnessing to the Anglican heritage, one of which had decided that local autonomy had to be the prevailing value and so had in good faith declined a covenantal structure.”

The message continued: “It helps to be clear about these possible futures, however much we think them less than ideal, and to speak about them not in apocalyptic terms of schism and excommunication but plainly as what they are — two styles of being Anglican, whose mutual relation will certainly need working out but which would not exclude cooperation in mission and service of the kind now shared in the Communion.”

See Anglican Sees ‘Two-Track’ Church @ New York Times