So this is what it is like to live under "The American Taliban"?

This has nothing at all to do with the fairly recent phenomenon of the rigid religious right's capture of Amercian media and policy-making. It's always been tough to be a teacher who's "different." There has always, as far as I know, been a "moral code" imposed upoin the profession.

I think the present case is not exactly the ideal poster child to change that.... there have been teachers who were gay, or black, or pregnant, or disabled, or radical for their area's politics, or single parents, or divorced, or.... I'm not awake enough yet to recount them all. Every one of those prejudices has been wrong, and every one of them has been upheld at one time or another in the local community that had that prejudice, until the prevailing societal view changed about that particular prejudice.

Until that time has come, a lot of folks have been, to one degree or another, in some sort of closet or another because they understood what they were up against.

And it's not only the teaching profession that works that way. Professional life works that way, in case y'all hadn't noticed.

My point in starting this thread was not that a particular person was being subjected to this pattern-- I don't have enough facts to know why the school moved as they did, and I have said that I will wait to see how the lawsuit shapes up. My point was that it's naive for young, career-minded folks to think that the internet won't bite them in the butt, in the present atmosphere of instant Googling in place of more carefully-documentable background checks-- that the outraged tone of the coverage is naive.

But don't let the loudness of the media hype fool anyone into thinking this is something new or particularly due to the RRR. Pennsylvania is by and large a pretty conservative state, despite the more liberal areas for which its famous.

~Susan