Well, the analogous case here would be Tyler Chase Harper in '04, who wore to school a T-shirt saying "Homosexuality is shameful - Romans 1:27" and "Be ashamed, our school has embraced what God condemned." the day after the Day of Silence against homophobia. The ACLU was surprisingly silent themselves on the matter, even though they handled two similar incidents nearby. They did eventually get involved but not until they'd been kicked in the teeth about hypocrisy. Been a lot of cases like that too, which is how they got their not-entirely-deserved rep for being color-blind unless the colors were red or blue.



It's pretty strong on the right too, with a track record of around 150 years, nobody changed our platform on the matter, with notable republicans for civil liberties being President Lincoln and Dr. King. Our track record on it has been a bit different though, as the usual republican attitude on civil liberties these days could be best summed up with our happy motto 'If you're gonna burn the flag, please wrap yourself in it first', which is to say by and large the left and right tend to have the same opinions on a lot of it, except a lot of people on the left tend to get teary-eyed and advocate the 'victim' as a hero, and the right tends to tack in the wind more on the 'We freely support this ignorant dirtbag's right wear a swastika on his shirt while wandering around Harlem, and we certainly will prosecute his various murderers, assuming they are found, as we expect the police will understandably be devoting their energies to more important cases than what amounts to assisted suicide'.

The default right-wing take on this girl's case tends to be rather unsympathetic. Girl wants to go to prom with other girl, she's either a dateless wonder or a lesbian, who cares? Oh, she's making a political statement, great, so the statements more important to her than the prom, since she could easily have attended with another girl and simply not have said anything to raise a fuss. Common courtesy says keep the politics away from a major emotional event of most teens lives. If the prom was important to her the way it is to most people, she would have just gone with her date and no one would have stopped her, instead she's decided to throw a self-righteous fit and disrupt everyone else's experience when she likely could have aired her views on this left and right all day long without objection from the school board and either attended anyway or simply not have gone out of protest. There's a difference between protesting a war and protesting a war at a military funeral, although the ACLU happens to believe otherwise on that too.

Hence sympathy for her is going to be rather limited, regardless of whether one happens to like or dislike the school board which probably was not sitting around saying "I ain't not gonna have no darn Dyke showing her sinner face at our school." Personally I don't approve of minors being given much leeway to protest. I'm also a big believer in school uniforms and gender-segregated middle and high schools, so my reasoning on these sorts of things tends to be different, I couldn't give a snot if a lesbian attends a prom, open or otherwise they've been doing for as long as we've had them after all, and her choice of apparel, so long as it meets the standards of decency, means nothing to me. Her decision to disrupt, as a minor, an event attended by other minors, to the point of taking legal action, doesn't meet with much approval from me, she is not a modern day Rosa Parks. Fighting for your principle is an honorable and time-honored tradition, but one is unlikely to garner much sympathy from me when doing it in what I view as a petty fashion. Writing a letter to the school board and a guest column in the paper then attending anyway in a dress would have been classier and wiser too, especially in adults vs minor, showing maturity and restraint tends to win more support than filing a lawsuit, and if one's goal is to actually change things, instead of just get attention and be seen as a heroine of civil rights, that would have been the better course.