Long Island High School Bans Gay Prom Dates

It is essential to note here that St. Anthony’s is under no legal obligation to change this (or any) policy regarding its gay students. Because it is a private school, it is not bound by New York State’s anti-discrimination laws. Were it a public school, these policies would not only be questionable, they would be illegal, says Melissa Goodman, senior litigation and policy counsel for LGBT and Reproductive Rights at the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU). Says Goodman, “A public school that did this would be violating the student’s constitutional rights to free expression and equal treatment, as well as anti-discrimination statutes.”

To be clear, St. Anthony’s is not the first school in the country to encounter such a conflict. These things come up every couple of years, in one form or another, and the results rarely favor the student. For instance:

• In 2005, a Lutheran high school in California’s Riverside County expelled two 16-year-old girls for having “a bond of intimacy” that was “characteristic of a lesbian relationship.” (The conflict arose on MySpace, of all places—one of the girls was identified as bisexual on her MySpace page; the other’s page said she was “not sure” of her sexual orientation. A teacher was tipped off by another student to these admissions, which led to an investigation—and later, expulsion—of the students.) In June 2006, the California Supreme Court ruled that the two girls could sue the school—which they did, seeking reinstatement, punitive damages in excess of $25,000, and the future protection of homosexual students from expulsion by the school. However, an appeals court decided that the private religious school was not a business and therefore did not have to comply with California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act, which prohibits businesses from discriminating.
• In 2006, Laura Murphy—then a senior at Villa Maria Academy, an all-girls Catholic high school in Buffalo, N.Y.—planned on attending her school’s prom with her girlfriend at the time. The administration stepped in, and told Murphy to bring an opposite-sex date or attend the event alone. Like Angelina, Murphy circulated a petition—in this case gathering signatures from more than one-third of the school’s 130 students. Just as in Angelina’s case, though, the petition was not enough to bring about change: Administrators at Villa Maria Academy held their ground. “There are some principles we need to stand by,” Sister M. Ambrose Wozniak, provincial minister of the Felician Sisters, told Buffalo News in 2006. “The prom would not be the place for this.”
• Last year, officials at Mississippi’s Itawamba Agricultural High School (NB: not a Catholic and/or private high school) told then-18-year-old senior Constance McMillen that she could not bring her sophomore girlfriend to the prom and could not wear a tuxedo to the event; the school then prohibited all students from bringing same-sex dates to the prom. McMillen petitioned, leading to the school board canceling the prom altogether. In a statement, the school board members said, “Due to the distractions to the educational process caused by recent events, the Itawamba County School District has decided to not host a prom at Itawamba Agricultural High School this year.” (A decision that threatened to further ostracize and demonize McMillen. As she told USA Today last March, “That’s really messed up because the message they are sending is that if they have to let gay people go to prom than they are not going to have one. A bunch of kids at school are really going to hate me for this.”) Then, the school board invited “private citizens” to host a prom—presumably because, as sex columnist and gay rights activist Dan Savage pointed out, “a group of private citizens, unlike a public school, can bar McMillen and her girlfriend from prom without risking a lawsuit.”

Whether the issue is prevalent at Long Island Catholic schools, though, is harder to determine. According to www.cathhsli.org, there are 10 Catholic high schools on Long Island, including St. Anthony’s. Of those schools, two have ceased to hold prom altogether: sister schools Chaminade in Mineola and Kellenberg in Uniondale. The all-boys school Chaminade instead offers a platonic senior cruise; co-ed Kellenberg, a class trip. In 2005, Kellenberg administrators presented a four-page letter to parents of its students explaining this decision, noting that prom is “far from what is expected in a Christian educational institution,” and the school “does not want to be associated with or give support to the current prom practice.” (The seven schools not named here were contacted numerous times by the Press for comment, but all declined to do so.)

Off Long Island, the response was the same from every Catholic high school that would comment on the record. Says Fran Davies, Associate Superintendent of Schools of Archdiocese of New York, “To my knowledge, no independent Catholic high school within the boundaries of the Archdiocese of New York permits same-sex prom dates.” According to Tom Gould, interim head of Bishop Maginn High School in Albany, “All I know is that a prom is going to be held, and I haven’t heard of gay-couple dates.” Meanwhile, Principal Joan Gallagher at St. Joseph High School in Brooklyn, says, “Our proms are a very nice evening for the senior class. They come together and celebrate their time together at the school.” She also notes that the students “don’t bring dates of the same sex.”

With regard to St. Anthony’s, Brother Gary says that Catholic ethics are essential to every aspect of educational and administrative policies. “We are not a public school,” he says. “We have an espoused 2,000-year tradition of certain ethical principles that are important enough that parents would elect to take [children] out of the public sector and put them in a religious setting so that they could get inculcated with 2,000 years’ worth of wisdom.”

Brother Joshua puts it more succinctly: “Certainly there are students who are gay in school, but I would have to hope that they would explore the whole dating issue not at St. Anthony’s senior prom.”

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