a dance as a couple. (This was after the people selling tickets declined to give them to us.) We got quite a few student and teacher signatures, then brought it before the administration. Their reaction was basically, "Sure, all you had to do was ask."

It was surprising to us, since my hometown is in the Midwest and is fairly middle-of-the-road as far as social/religious values are concerned. But I think they were clever enough to realize that if they said yes, well, there'd be two girls dancing together as a couple, amongst the dozens of other girls dancing together as friends... in short, no one would care or even notice. If they said no, on the other hand, there was the risk of an annoying media hoopla.

So I don't know if the school district in this story was acting out of malice/spite, but I do think it's behaving foolishly, especially if the goal was to avoid or downplay the issue.

Caveat: my girlfriend and I both wore dresses. That was the dress code and we just didn't see a reason to object - we were both lipstick lesbians anyway.