Protesters target Delaware Christian School again

KATE LIEBERS

Staff Writer

Clash­ing ide­olo­gies man­i­fested near Delaware Chris­t­ian School for the sec­ond time in four weeks, when a group protested the school administration’s deci­sion to remove a man from the school’s list of hon­ored alumni after he iden­ti­fied him­self as gay.

The most recent protest took place this week and involved about eight peo­ple backed by les­bian, gay, bisex­ual, trans­gen­der (LGBT) advo­cacy groups, GetE­QUAL Ohio and Act Out Delaware.

The pro­test­ers said Delaware Chris­t­ian Head Admin­is­tra­tor Gor­don McDonald’s deci­sion to remove David Emer­son from the dis­tin­guished alumni list was discriminatory.

“What mes­sage does this send to non-straight kids who attend this school?” said Tom Mor­gan, state lead orga­nizer for GetEQUAL.

Emer­son said he inter­preted it as: If you’re gay, you don’t matter.

“For edu­ca­tors to adopt this stance sends a dan­ger­ous mes­sage,” Mor­gan said.

Emerson’s sup­port­ers linked the inter­pre­ta­tion of the school’s action to sta­tis­tics show­ing that four times as many LGBT stu­dents com­mit sui­cide than straight students.

McDon­ald said there was no evi­dence of that state­ment being rel­e­vant to Delaware Chris­t­ian School.

“There are teens who have com­mit­ted sui­cide, who have been mis­treated because of sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion. We know that hap­pens. I think there’s no rea­son to think that applies here,” he said.

He, like Emerson’s group, asked for tolerance.

“Delaware Chris­t­ian has a First Amend­ment right to post or remove what we want from our web­site based on what we choose to pro­mote regard­ing our alumni,” McDon­ald said.

“Tol­er­ance and accep­tance are called for by the gay, les­bian, bisex­ual, trans­gen­der com­mu­ni­ties for their move­ment, how­ever, Delaware Chris­t­ian is not being afforded that same tol­er­ance based on our under­stand­ing of the Holy Scrip­ture which is our basis of our edu­ca­tional phi­los­o­phy and prac­tices,” he added.

Con­se­quently, McDon­ald said he was not con­sid­er­ing re-posting Emerson’s profile.

“The issue remains exactly the same,” he said. “Our posi­tion, based on Bib­li­cal prin­ci­ples, is cor­rect and I am not will­ing to com­pro­mise on that.”

While McDon­ald said he “would like to bring this to an end,” Emer­son said he was not about to accept McDonald’s decision.

“I do want to see change. I don’t want this to go by the way­side,” Emer­son said. “What the next step is, I’m not sure. But it’s not some­thing I’m going to let go.”

Emer­son wanted McDon­ald to re-post his pro­file, which was exclu­sively about Emerson’s pro­fes­sional accom­plish­ments in radio and did not relate to sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion. The pro­test­ers believed a re-posting would undo the mes­sage they believe McDon­ald has sent: that your accom­plish­ments will not be respected if you are gay.

The three-hour protest was also meant to show sup­port for the LGBT student.

“Sta­tis­ti­cally speak­ing, there are LGBT stu­dents in there,” said Emer­son. “We want to let them know they are sup­ported and loved.”

The advo­cacy groups also used the demon­stra­tion to request direct con­ver­sa­tion between the Delaware Chris­t­ian School admin­is­tra­tion and the LGBT community.

Act Out Delaware Vice Pres­i­dent Tony Mar­coni said he tried to arrange a dis­cus­sion with McDon­ald to dis­cuss the impli­ca­tions of remov­ing Emerson’s pro­file and to talk about the con­text of the scrip­ture. He said he received no reply.

McDon­ald said he con­sid­ered approach­ing Emer­son dur­ing the protest, but ulti­mately declined.

“We would like to agree to dis­agree,” McDon­ald said.

Over­all, McDon­ald described the sit­u­a­tion as “sad” and was con­cerned about the school’s reputation.

“This pub­lic­ity is both­er­ing me,” he said, observ­ing the protest from a dis­tance. “I would like to go back to hav­ing a good rela­tion­ship with David.”

While Emer­son said he remains proud of the edu­ca­tion he received at DCS, he said the whole point of the protests were to expose a “taboo” topic.

He said he was pleased with the public’s reac­tion to the protest — even if it did not change McDonald’s mind.

Posted by Kate Liebers on Nov 17 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.