If internet reports are correct, the teen who went to court for the right to attend her prom is Mississippi with a same-sex date was redirected Friday night to a “fake prom” with only five other students in attendance.
While Constance McMillen and a handful of other students attended the “prom,” the balance of the students attended a prom from which McMillen was deliberately directed away from and then deliberately excluded from attending:
The judge declined to force the school district to hold the prom because a parent-sponsored, private prom was being organized — and the understanding was that McMillen and her date were invited to that event. But Hampton says McMillen was never invited and organizers made it very difficult for her to find information on the time and location. That prom was later mysteriously canceled, with the Friday night event at the country club officially replacing it.
McMillen confirms that version of events, and says that the prom she attended was also attended by students with “learning difficulties”:
Two students with learning difficulties were among the seven people at the country club event, McMillen recalls. “They had the time of their lives,” McMillen says. “That’s the one good thing that come out of this, [these kids] didn’t have to worry about people making fun of them [at their prom].”
It’s difficult to imagine that all the other students would be able to keep their yaps shut forevermore about the secret prom, and reports on the Facebook group supporting McMillen’s efforts to attend her prom say that other students uploaded pictures from the “real prom.” If the picture above is accurate and taken on the night of the fake prom, it would appear that more than seven students were in attendance.
While the real, secret prom was likely parent sponsored and private (ruling out ACLU intervention) a commenter on the Advocate’s coverage of the incident who identifies himself as Christopher Bingham has a novel solution for discouraging similar behavior in the future:
We live in the age of the internet. Surely the people who organized the other party have names and if it was country club, or a church that hosted they have names too. The kids that orgnanized the event and thir [sic] parents should be known to the world. As an employer, I know I wouldn’t hire anyone who organized something like that – and the internet is forever. There are surely lots of jobs in the fundie world for this kind of sewage, but not so much in the rest of the world. A future enmployer should see the names of these kids much like what you get when you google “santorum.” the only person who has risked anything is the young woman who sued. The other side should have some consequences for their actions as well.