Tearing down the signs of tolerance

We doubt it would happen.

Except one BHS club that encourages all students to treat each other with dignity and respect has a different name.

It’s the Gay/Straight Alliance (GSA).

And some people, unfortunately, are either unwilling or unable to tolerate homosexuality.

We applauded that decision.

And we struggle to understand why anyone would object to a club founded on the premise that all students deserve to be treated with respect.

Earlier this month the GSA put up posters at BHS touting April 16 as a “Day of Silence,” a national event designed to call attention to the intimidation and bullying that some gays, lesbians and bisexuals endure.

Students who chose to participate in the event stayed silent that day, except when they were called on in class.

We’ve heard nothing that suggests the event in any way disrupted the school.

(If anything, the relative absence of noise ought to have made it easier to learn.)

However, before the Day of Silence, “a small group of students” pulled down some of the GSA’s posters, said Gundula O’Neal, BHS assistant principal. She told those students to stop.

We don’t know what motivated those students to wreck somebody else’s work.

But the notion, which some have advanced, that their vandalism was a sort of protest against students using a public school to advance a political position seems to us farfetched, and even a trifle silly.

Yet even if the poster-rippers were indeed acting out of political rather than personal concerns, they picked a cowardly method for expressing their opinion.

Tearing down posters is the sort of thoughtless childish antic that’s the antithesis of reasoned, respectful debate.

We’re not surprised that some people contend the real purpose of the Day of Silence was to promote homosexuality.

We wonder, though, whether these critics have so convinced themselves that homosexuality is abnormal and, well, just plain wrong, that they’re incapable of recognizing broader truths.

We’re talking about really outlandish ideas, too.

The notion, for instance, that it’s possible to be heterosexual yet also believe that homosexuals deserve, as much as anyone else, to be able to put up posters on the wall of a high school.

And the quaint concept that what defines a person are chromosomes and genes, not whom he or she chooses to have sex with.

Which concept, as we understand it, pretty well explains the chief goal of the GSA.

To that goal we would add another: We ought to strive to talk about our differences, and when we do so let’s address each other by name. Every BHS student has one, after all.

And we doubt any has “gay” or “lesbian” printed on his or her birth certificate.