I Blame Glee

I blame Glee. I do. It's the only explanation that makes sense. Really, it's absolutely the only thing that can possibly explain the latest ruse on the part of Itawamba School District in their ongoing battle against both lesbian student Constance Mcmillen and the notion of basic human decency. Someone at the District has been watching too much Glee, probably at the same time as their weekly Oxycontin binge, and so, during the latest meeting of the Emergency Keep Out The Gays Committee, this member of staff, high on a cocktail of power ballads and hillbilly heroin, pipes up with:

'Like, why don't we just hold a fake prom?'

Because that's what they actually did. Held a fake prom to which Constance and her friends were invited, while the rest of the students partied the night away elsewhere. Like I say, I can only blame Glee - except that wouldn't really cut it, because even Sue Sylvester would regard this plan as somewhat outlandish. In fact, frankly, a Scooby Doo villain would take one look at this 'fake prom' idea and say 'for fuck's sake, you're not serious, are you? I mean, pretending to be a headless horseman haunting the school grounds might just about work with a decent special effects budget, but expecting to be able to hold an entire other prom without one person in the whole town blowing the gaff, pfffft, yeah right, don't even bother putting petrol in the Mystery Machine because Scrappy Doo could solve this fucker. You pesky meddling twats.'

And yet that's what Fulton High School and the Itawamba School District have been reduced to. And because of that, every single member of staff at that school, and every single member of that school district, should be fired immediately without pay, and be disbarred from having anything to do with education for the rest of their lives. This kind of excuse is not the kind of thing sane, rational adults do. This is the kind of thing the dumb husband does in a stupid American sitcom when he realises he's forgotten his wife's birthday. But real life isn't like that. Forget your wife's birthday and it doesn't matter how much shenanigating you engage in putting clocks back, gluing calendar pages back on and replacing every single copy of the local newspaper with yesterday's edition, you've dug your way into a vast pit of humiliation so deep that any attempt you make to dig yourself out short of the most grovelling, self-abasing, Maoist-self-criticism level of apology will merely strip you of what little dignity you have left.

This is the level of behaviour to which Fulton and Itawamba have been reduced. If this were a sitcom or a straight-to-DVD comedy movie they'd be played by Kevin James, and the closing scene would feature them frantically running around the party trying to convince Constance and her mates that what appears to be a teenage high school prom is in fact the annual meeting of the National Arab-American Proctologists Association (because Rob Schneider needs a chance to play more racist stereotypes), and it would all end with a ridiculous moment where Rob Schneider, dressed in a Saudi Prince's outfit, dry-humps James on a bucking bronco in a pool full of jello, and James would say something like 'I really made myself look like an ass this time!' and it would all be hilarious. And, you know, that's what it is. Hilarious.

Until you remember that these people are meant to be adults, they are meant to be teachers, and their bigotry and their intolerance and their craven refusal to act like grown-ups and admit they were wrong have ruined the biggest night of a young woman's life. That's when it stops looking hilarious and starts looking, frankly, pathetic.