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Texas Principal Cancels Entire Cosmetology Program to Avoid Teaching Gay Student

Posted by on Sep 17, 2012 in Oh Hell No! | 5 comments

Texas’ Taylor Career Center Principal Thomas Amons has gone full-blown Clint Eastwood on the school’s cosmetology program after a – GASP! – homosexual student signed up for classes.

Thomas Amons and Kwmane Gray

Rather than be allowed to accomodate the newest student in the steadily growing program, Instructor Cequada Clark was ordered to refuse to teach 22-year-old Kwmane Gray because he identifies as gay. When Clark refused to openly discriminate against her newest student, she was ultimately fired from her job.

But not before Principal Thomas consulted with the school’s legal team and learned that he was unable to ban gay students from taking cosmetology classes. Instead, Thomas elected to cancel the entire program.

“I take this very seriously. Most of my students coming in are single moms trying to move ahead and make a life for themselves. My thing is, I bust my tail off with this program: I give God the glory because it’s been doing good since I’ve been there. At the very least, I’d like to see Mr. Amons apologize to that young man and to allow those already entered in the program to finish their instruction to get licensed,” Clark said, adding that the right thing to do would be to continue the program and allow Gray to enter.

The complete story has more villainous twists and turns than a Cruella de Vil/Ursula Disney lesbian slash fiction story. I can promise you that we’ll all be hearing more about Amons, Clark and Gray as protests, lawsuits and expanded media coverage ripple outward from this incident, so you might as well go read up on all the crazy right now.

As terribly messed up as this is, it’s stories like this that show how important laws protecting LGBT people from discrimination are.

Expect someone to announce that the school has received state and federal funding, and as such has committed a very big no-no in exactly 3, 2, 1…

Who agrees that Principal Thomas – a Baptist deacon, by the way – should be the one to go, and not the cosmetology program?