Relevant Links




Your Ad Here

Orgies at teen proms!


From Uniondale, New York:

Kenneth M. Hoagland had heard all the stories about prom-night debauchery at his Long Island high school: Students putting down $10,000 to rent a house in the Hamptons for a weekend bash. Pre-prom cocktail parties followed by a trip to the dance in a limo loaded with liquor. Fathers chartering a boat so their kids could go out on a late-night "booze cruise."

I wonder if the mothers knew what the fathers were doing. I know what would happen to me if my wife found out I was helping charter a booze cruise for my daughter to attend.

Suffice it to say, Synthia Kavanagh and I would have something in common. Well, something missing in common.

Enough was enough, Hoagland said. So the principal of Kellenberg Memorial High School fired off a 2,000-word missive to parents at the start of the school year informing them that the Catholic school would no longer put on the spring prom.

Uh-oh, there's that Catholic thing again. A Catholic institution demanding Catholic behaviour from its members. I wonder if Slinger would like to the see that school shut down for being so unreasonable.

"It is not primarily the sex/booze/drugs that surround this event, as problematic as they might be; it is rather the flaunting of affluence, assuming exaggerated expenses, a pursuit of vanity for vanity's sake — in a word, financial decadence," Brother Hoagland said, fed up with what he calls the "bacchanalian aspects" of the prom.

"Each year it gets worse — becomes more exaggerated, more expensive, more emotionally traumatic," he added. "We are withdrawing from the battle and allowing the parents full responsibility. (Kellenberg) is willing to sponsor a prom, but not an orgy."

Interestingly, Brother Hoagland is putting the blame on the parents, and I think he's got it right. These are still children, after all. Parents should know better and should shoulder the responsibility to make sure their kids understand the consequences of their behaviour and their choices.

But these parents are not merely abrogating their responsibility, they are undermining whatever restraints and moral qualms their kids may have:

In his letter, Hoagland cited a litany of problems that he says have developed over the years. He began a dialogue on the future of the prom last spring after it was discovered that 46 Kellenberg seniors made a $10,000 down payment on a $20,000 rental in the Hamptons for a post-prom party. When school officials found out, they forced the students to cancel the deal; the kids got their money back and the prom went on as planned.

But Hoagland said some parents went ahead and rented a Hamptons house anyway.

Well, more than a few parents seem to be disgusted by the pro-orgy faction:

Some parents lined up in their cars outside the school to pick up their children on a recent afternoon said they are backing Hoagland.

"The school has excellent values," said Margaret Cameron of Plainview. "We send our children here because we support the values and the administration of the school and I totally back everything they do. I trust my child with them and I trust everything, all the decisions they make for them."

Hoagland said in an interview that parents, who pay $6,025 in annual tuition, have expressed appreciation for his stern stand. "For some, it (the letter) was an eye-opener," he said. "Others feel relieved that the pressure is off of them."

But not all is doom and gloom -- they're still going to Disneyland!

Besides, [senior Chris Laine] noted, the senior class still has a four-day trip to Disney World scheduled for April.

"We go to all the parks with our friends," he said just before hopping into his jet-black Infiniti and driving off to meet friends for an after-school bite to eat. "We fly down together and stay in the same hotel and so it's not like we're totally losing everything."

And I doubt any of them will be wearing this sort of thing in the Magic Kingdom.

I've always found it amusing that if a school pays for a Nativity scene, the forces of liberal correctness come down like a ton of bricks, but paying for sex-charged and booze-laiden blowout is just fine.

I wonder if the ACLU is going to get involved, demanding that the kids have their prom, since it is their right in some way. Don't laugh. It happened down the road from me. Marc Hall sued the Durham Catholic School Board in Ontario, Canada because he was told he would not be allowed to bring his gay date to the prom. The judge ruled not only that Marc Hall could being his date, the school could not cancel the prom, which it had suggested it would do, thus a Catholic institution was compeled to hold a prom which featured very un-Catholic behaviour.

Marc Hall, 17, brought his 21-year-old boyfriend to the prom.

Like I said at the beginning of this piece, I think schools should get out of the prom business altogether. Let like-minded parents hold events for their kids as they see fit, instead of forcing proms into a one-size fits all approach. Some kids drink. Some kids are gay. Some kids are sluts:

"The idea of equality speaks to the conscience of all humanity dignity and worth," [Ontario Superior Court Justice Robert McKinnon] wrote in his ruling.

If someone decides to take Brother Hoagland to court, I guess we'll find out if dignity encompasses the equality of boozed-up sex-crazed sluts.

Your Ad Here
Relevant Links




Your Ad Here

Create Commons License 2.5
Angry in the Great White North by Steve Janke is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License. Based on a work at stevejanke.com.
Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict
[Valid Atom 1.0]
Valid CSS!