By Michael Cole
Fair-minded Americans were thrilled last night when Clint McCance – the Midlands School Board Vice President from Pleasant Plains, Arkansas, who was under fire for an anti-gay Facebook tirade – announced he would resign from the board. Appearing on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, McCance apologized for his screed that said he would disown his children if they were gay and encouraged LGBT youth suicide. Read his full posts from when we broke the news on Tuesday evening.
HRC was originally alerted to the comments by Anthony Turner, a 1998 graduate of Midland High School. Turner’s hope was that national attention would help kids from his town – and ones like it – know that people care about them and hopefully prevent other officials from creating the kind of environment that McCance fostered. On the heels of a number of bullying-related suicides, we could not let McCance’s hate-filled posts go unanswered.
Because of Arkansas law, the only option at our disposal was for Mr. McCance to resign so we sprang into action to bring enormous pressure upon him, his colleagues on the local school board and his constituents.
The Advocate was the first media outlet to report the story on Tuesday evening, causing so much traffic that their site was periodically unavailable. Other LGBT blogs followed suit. HRC also posted screenshots of McCance’s rant on our blog, additionally pointing users to our “Welcoming Schools” resources that give elementary school administrators, teachers and parents across the country the tools to prevent bias-based teasing and harassment among elementary school students.
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