If you’ve been having a good day so far and want to remember what soul crushing despair for humanity feels like, just read this Associated Press story from Ponce de Leon, Florida.  You’ll want to punch someone in the face and then probably take up drinking.

When a high school senior told her principal [David Davis] that students were taunting her for being a lesbian, he told her homosexuality is wrong, outed her to her parents, and ordered her to stay away from children.

He suspended some of her friends who expressed their outrage by wearing gay pride T-shirts and buttons at Ponce de Leon High School, according to court records. And he asked dozens of students whether they were gay or associated with gay students.

…

“Davis embarked on what can only be characterized as a witch hunt to identify students who were homosexual and their supporters, further adding fuel to the fire,” US District Judge Richard Smoak recounted in his ruling. “He went so far as to lift the shirts of female students to ensure the letters ‘GP’ or the words ‘Gay Pride’ were not written on their bodies.”

Even if we suspend all morality and humanity for a moment and suppose that a witch hunt for gay supporters were justified, how is it even then acceptable for a high school principle to start lifting up his female students’ shirts?  Perhaps they should have taken to writing it under their bras so we could more easily convinct the guy as a sexual predator.  More importantly, of course, school principals are not empowered to crusade against homosexuals.

Heather Gillman (in the article’s photograph) was one of the students who protested in defense of the anonymous gay student. Her mother, Ardena Gillman, got it exactly right:

“What happens when these kids get out in the real world after they leave Ponce de Leon and they have a black homosexual supervisor at their job?” she said.

Hold whatever views you want in private, but if you can’t teach tolerance to the children under your supervision in a public school, you should be kept at least a thousand meters away from any place where minors gather.

The district had to pay $325,000 to cover the ACLU’s attorney fees.  The students who were sensible enough to stand up and protest should get another $325,000 to invest in improving their school in any way they want – up to and including firing the idiot that runs it.