No Dancing in Cranston
One of my favorite nights of the year is the father/daughter dance at my kids' school.
I've been taking both of my girls for years. I even go to my own front door -- corsages in hand -- to pick them up. They love it. They dance, eat pizza, and congregate with their friends. I love it too, especially at the end of the night when the DJ announces the final song and the three of us dance together one last time. It's a special moment made more poignant by the fact that one day it will be gone forever.
That's why I am so glad that my girls are not enrolled in the Cranston Rhode Island School District where father/daughter dances are now banned because, according to the ACLU, they constitute gender discrimination.
The ACLU filed a lawsuit against the district after a single mother complained that her daughter was excluded from the dance because she does not have a father active in her life. The Cranston School Superintendant Judith Lundsten said that the traditional dances would no longer be sponsored by the district because they violated a state anti-discrimination law.
Now I've been practicing law for the better part of two decades, and though I'm no Justice Marshall, I can't seem to put my head around a gender discrimination lawsuit where both genders are allowed to fully participate. After all, the daughters are female and the dads are male. Even those who can't participate represent both genders -- moms and sons. It sounds to me more like discrimination based on relationship status -- hardly a protected classification.
Where does this lead? Is Grandma suing next?
Unfortunately, this is what happens when liberal legislators, spineless and complicit public school administrators, and their cronies at the radical ACLU come together to punish those who promote and then embody traditional social roles -- like father and daughter and mother and son -- that are celebrated and sacred in religious faith. Their immediate goal is to reduce the importance of those roles and to strip them of anything unique or valuable. Doing so supports their ultimate goal -- to use the coercive power of the state to mandate their values at the expense of those bestowed upon us by God.
The victims of their treachery are manifest. Girls in Cranston don't get a special night out with their dads and classmates. The dads lose the chance to capture one more fleeting moment with girls growing up too fast. And the daughter of a single mom and no dad to speak of, already with the odds stacked against her, gets sacrificed at the altar of radical liberalism. I know she wanted to go to the dance and not be singled out. But that wasn't the problem. The problem was that she had no one to go with -- no uncle, cousin, coach or volunteer big brother -- and a mother more concerned about victimhood and prominence than rectifying that sad fact. So instead of learning a little bit about how kind and strong and fun and protecting a man can be, she learned how venal and craven power hungry adults can be.
I've come to my own door every year to prepare my girls for the day that it won't be me knocking. One small hedge against the onslaught of a tough world only made tougher by those in Rhode Island who have lost their way.
