By pleading to travel to Alabama, the Rocket Owls betray an ethical commitment to equality and civil rights. It’s a sad day, indeed, when a club, which prides itself on its diversity puts attaining ‘honors’ before principle.
Eschewing solidarity with their transgender and gay brothers and sisters, the Rocket Owls may prefer Alabamians who nearly elected the unabashed bigot, Roy Moore.
At the Feb. 6 Citrus College Board of Trustees meeting, after reciting their varied international and economic backgrounds, the Rocket Owls denounced the board for putting politics before education in prohibiting travel to Alabama’s NASA student launch competition.
[perfectpullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Weren’t these the students applying rainbow flag filters to their online profiles only three years ago?[/perfectpullquote]
The California law prohibiting travel was passed in response to North Carolina’s anti-trans gender bathroom bill. It was not the board’s decision. The students further confuse “politics” with moral courage.
Just listen to the soaring language of the bill, which prohibits funding travel to states that permit “discrimination …on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.”
Rocket Owls said they oppose discrimination at the board meeting, but lament the thousands of hours of work they dedicated to the competition that may be lost.
But how many more hours must the transgendered suffer by not being allowed peace in as gender-neutral an act as using a restroom? This, in the same states where those rooms once read “Whites Only.”
Weren’t these the students applying rainbow flag filters to their online profiles only three years ago? If the Rocket Owls disgrace the college colors by skirting the law, students of conviction should drape themselves in the banner of the Bear Flag Republic instead.
Board of Trustees President Patricia Rasmussen accurately calls this “a civil rights issue.” On this 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder, the team cannot pretend which side they choose in the war against discrimination.
