In a case she said was more about “hurt feelings” than “government-sponsored censorship,” a California judge has ruled that a high-school teacher did not discriminate against a Mormon student by disciplining her for saying “That's so gay” in class.

Rebekah Rice claimed she was ridiculed and harassed after being punished for her “That's so gay” comment while a freshman at Maria Carrillo High School in Santa Rosa. She and her parents sued the school district in a politically-charged case that, after more than three years of litigation, went to a non-jury trial in February.

In a tentative decision, Sonoma County Superior Court Judge Elaine Rushing said she understood that Rice's parents “feel extremely frustrated and heartsick” about her high-school experience. But unfair punishment and teasing “Unfortunately ... is part of what teenagers endure in becoming adults” and

the law, with all its majesty and might, is simply too crude and imprecise an instrument to satisfactorily soothe deeply hurt feelings.

The case generated heated debate about whether Rice's use of “That's so gay” was homophobic or simply colloquial. She testified she was responding to a classmate who had been teasing her about her Mormon faith and asked, “Do you have ten moms?”

Rushing reached no conclusion about Rice's intent, focusing instead on the core issue of whether humanities teacher Claudine Gans-Rugebregt selectively punished her because of her religious beliefs.

According to Gans-Rugebregt, she had a policy of issuing an instant “referral,” or written reprimand, to any student who used racial, gender or other slurs. After the class, she asked Rice if she knew why she was being reprimanded.

“Rebekah admitted that she did not know,” Rushing noted, going on to say the testimony was persuasive because it showed that “it is extremely unlikely that anyone else did, either.”

“This leads the court to conclude that if the Rice family had not told everyone that Rebekah had been given a referral for saying 'That's so gay' then no one else would have known it either, and she would not have been referred to as the 'That's so gay girl,'” the judge said.

Gans-Rugebregt testified she had similarly reprimanded other students for using the same phrase and Rushing called the plaintiffs' claims of selective punishment “speculation.”

The school district argued that the case was part of a “political effort” by anti-gay activists to shape its curriculum. Rushing appeared to disagree with that argument, praising the plaintiffs for generating “a great deal of dialog” about the involvement of schools in “traditionally non-academic subjects as morality, religion, sexuality, and politics.”

But Rice's parents may have done more to ruin her high-school experience than Gans-Rugebregt –- particularly as the referral went only into her “discipline” file rather than her “cumulative” file, which can be forwarded to colleges and other institutions. Rice, 18, is now a student at Santa Rosa Junior College.

By Matthew Heller
5/17/07