Adolescents grappling with sexual identity issues have a difficult enough time of it without facing the added challenges of prejudice, discrimination, and harassment. While many such youth have found refuge and support in Gay-Straight Alliance groups in their schools, others are denied even that. In the small Bible Belt community of Okeechobee, Florida, one teen who has experienced strong resistance to forming such a group is courageously refusing to take no for an answer. And now she has the ACLU on her side, as reported here by the Associated Press:

Club that supports gay teens meets hostility in Okeechobee

The message to gays in this rural cattle town is spoken politely, sometimes with a drawl, sometimes quoting the Bible, but the meaning is anything but a hospitable Southern welcome.

High school senior Yasmin Gonzalez has been hearing it a lot lately – from kids hanging out bus windows shouting, “Are you the one that’s gay?” to the teacher who said homosexuals should die.

Gonzalez, 17, has become something of a target since November, when the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit on her behalf against the Okeechobee High School principal and school board for refusing to let her establish a Gay-Straight Alliance, an after-school club that promotes dialogue and tolerance.

“There’s so much discrimination here,” she says.

She is suing under the 1984 federal Equal Access Act, which ironically was initially pushed by evangelical Christians after some public schools banned after-school prayer meetings and other religious gatherings. It says that if a public school allows any extracurricular activities to meet on campus it must allow all groups to do the same.

Similar challenges have been mounted by other groups in Utah, Georgia and North Carolina.

But public sentiment runs against Gonzalez in Okeechobee, a town of about 5,500 residents and around 60 churches 70 miles northwest of West Palm Beach.

“I don’t think it’s right. If they’re going to let that in school, it’s showing it’s OK. In the Bible it says it’s an abomination. (A Gay-Straight Alliance) is not a message you want to give your kids,” 31-year-old Dave Mangold said, sitting on a picnic bench in the heart of town one afternoon. [full text]

For those who would justify their intolerance and discrimination by hiding behind the Bible, here is a pithy response from the television series, The West Wing: