Texas high school student suspended for saying homosexuality is wrong

by Kathleen Gilbert

• FORT WORTH, Texas, September 23, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A Christian high school student was punished by his school this week for saying he believes “being a homosexual is wrong.”

14-year-old Dakota Ary was suspended for saying he believes being a homosexual is "wrong."

Dakota Ary, 14, says his statement was part of a one-on-one conversation about religions in Germany with a friend sitting behind him during a language class, according to a local Fox News report.

“I guess [the teacher] heard me. He started yelling,” said Ary. “He told me he was going to write me an infraction and send me to the office.”

Holly Pope, Ary’s mother, said she was in “disbelief” over the punishment. “My son is on the honor roll with great grades. I don’t have any problems out of him,” she said.

The mother was not satisfied when the school principal reduced the in-school suspension from two days to one. She brought an attorney with her to meet the principal Wednesday and is demaning a promise of no retaliation over the event and that the event be removed from Ary’s record.

“Students don’t lose their first amendment rights just because they go in the schoolhouse door,” Pope’s attorney Matt Krause told myFOXdfw.com. The school has yet to make a decision.

Punishment for objecting to homosexuality, while common in countries such as Canada and the U.K., is also rising in United States schools and universities.

A biology teacher in California last year won a $100,000 settlement after she was fired for answering a student’s question by citing research that homosexuality “may be influenced by both genes and the environment.”

At the University of Illinois in July 2010, school officials fired a Catholic theology teacher after he asserted that homosexuality was, according to Catholic teaching, contrary to the moral law. Prof. Kenneth Howell, who had simultaneously lost his position at the Catholic Newman Center on campus, was reinstated days later after thousands protested.

Also in 2010 news broke of the story of a counseling student at Augusta State University, who, after her professors learned of her Christian beliefs on homosexuality, was told to attend workshops to improve her sensitivity towards homosexuals, to complete remedial reading, and to write papers describing the impact of such measures on her beliefs, as a condition of continuing in the program.