Conservative talk show host Janet Mefferd this week waded into the controversy about an Indiana high school where a group of students wanted to organize a separate prom that would specifically prevent gay and lesbian students from attending.
After lamenting that “public schools are morally bankrupt,” Mefferd asserted that proms which allow all students — gay or straight — to attend actually violate the rights of Christian students who disapprove of homosexuality.
What right in particular, you might ask?
According to Mefferd, apparently the right of students not to even see gay people!
She maintained that the students’ desire not to see gay students outweighs the rights of gay students to attend their own prom.
“Why should the rights of the [gay] activists trump the rights of Christians” who don’t want “to see that,” Mefferd asked.
Mefferd: Everything is so upside down in our society now and right and wrong have completely switched where what is really wrong is to say you shouldn’t have two boys allowed to go to the high school prom. Now we can get into a big issue of the public schools are morally bankrupt at this point and we all ought to exit and just let them, let them do their thing, and that may be the ultimate answer; on the other hand, I feel for these Christian kids who are in a prom or kids who are at this high school who say, ‘you know something, do we have to go down this road?’ Whether the homosexual activists like it or not, and I know this isn’t politically correct to say this, but not everybody wants to see that. I know that that’s offensive to the activist crowd, they want us all to see it, they want us all to approve of it, they want us all to call it blessed and okay and rejoice and have parties and throw confetti in the air over this whole thing. But the fact of the matter is it’s a moral issue. You will always have Christians who will disagree with this and why should the rights of the activists trump the rights of Christians?
Update 2/20: Mefferd spent a good part of the weekend tweeting at us, and a good portion of her show yesterday railing against us, claiming that we had "libeled" her with this post. Today, we received a letter [PDF] from her attorneys demanding that we remove this post and asserting that even though we had quoted her verbatim, we had misrepresented her views.
According to this letter, Mefferd claims that she was merely saying that some people object to seeing gay couples at prom, not that Christians have a right not to see gay people in general:
Ms. Mefferd’s comment, in discussing a controversy in an Indiana high school about attendance by homosexual couples at a high school prom, was that ‘not everybody wants to see that.’ (emphasis added). Ms. Mefferd was not making a statement about homosexual people, or any other people for that matter, when making that statement, as Ms. Mefferd would have said ‘not everybody wants to see them.’ Mefferd’s statement was about the inclusion of homosexual couples at a high school prom, and made a factual statement that ‘not everybody wants to see that.’
What’s the difference you ask? Good question. We stand by our original post and think that the audio clip we posted speaks for itself.
