http://www.examiner.com/article/profile-of-gay-student-yearbook-stirs-controversy

This year's Lenoir City High School yearbook features a small article by an openly gay student, Zac Mitchell, who describes his experience with coming out to his fellow students and how it has affected his time in school. Van Shaver, a school board member, then wrote on his personal blog a posting that openly condemns the article, homosexuality, and by implication, Zac Mitchell. You can read his blog post here: http://www.vanshaver.com/its_not_ok.htm

This school board member condemns the yearbook advisor, specifically, for allowing this article to be printed and for "inflicting his views on impressionable students." At the same time, he claims not to be intolerant, yet he calls being gay "a decision" that Zac will have to live with the consequences of. Science has repeatedly proven Mr. Shaver wrong...it is not a choice, but a fact. The only choices made here were as follows:

Mr. Mitchell made the choice to be honest about his feelings and to share his perspective and experiences with his fellow student body.

Mr. Shaver made the choice to belittle a student and make him the focus of a religiously-motivated rant with obvious political connotations.

Please help us tell Mr. Shaver to keep his religious beliefs and political viewpoints to himself. As a school board member, he has no business turning a student yearbook into a soapbox for his personal intolerances. We would like to see him remove his heinous blog post, which has spawned a bullying campaign of petitions aimed at getting students to rip Zac Mitchell's article out of their yearbooks, as though defacing their yearbooks and invalidating this boy's life experience is something honorable and just. He also owes Zac Mitchell a public apology. School officials must stop using their positions as a bully pulpit for their personal ideology!