The following is an excerpt from "A boy and his flag" by David Koon in the Arkansas Times. For the full article, follow the link at the end of the page.
Will Phillips isn't like other boys his age.
For one thing, he's smart. Scary smart. A student in the West Fork School District in Washington County, he skipped a grade this year, going directly from the third to the fifth. When his family goes for a drive, discussions are much more apt to be about Teddy Roosevelt and terraforming Mars than they are about Spongebob Squarepants and what's playing on Radio Disney.
It was during one of those drives that the discussion turned to the pledge of allegiance and what it means. Laura Phillips is Will's mother. “Yes, my son is 10,” she said. “But he's probably more aware of the meaning of the pledge than a lot of adults. He's not just doing it rote recitation. We raised him to be aware of what's right, what's wrong, and what's fair.”
Will's family has a number of gay friends. In recent years, Laura Phillips said, they've been trying to be a straight ally to the gay community, going to the pride parades and standing up for the rights of their gay and lesbian neighbors. They've been especially dismayed by the effort to take away the rights of homosexuals – the right to marry, and the right to adopt. Given that, Will immediately saw a problem with the pledge of allegiance.
“I've always tried to analyze things because I want to be lawyer,” Will said. “I really don't feel that there's currently liberty and justice for all.”
After asking his parents whether it was against the law not to stand for the pledge, Will decided to do something. On Monday, Oct. 5, when the other kids in his class stood up to recite the pledge of allegiance, he remained sitting down. The class had a substitute teacher that week, a retired educator from the district, who knew Will's mother and grandmother. Though the substitute tried to make him stand up, he respectfully refused. He did it again the next day, and the next day. Each day, the substitute got a little more cross with him. On Thursday, it finally came to a head. The teacher, Will said, told him that she knew his mother and grandmother, and they would want him to stand and say the pledge.
- Full story in Arkansas Times
Two weeks later, LGBT Parenting columnist Bill Delaney writes in a column “The tug of war over the next generation” in examiner.com that those after full equality should closely watch “a tug of war going on over the younger generation" as it "calls into question the certitude of that outcome [full equality for the U.S.’s LGBT citizens is a matter not of ‘if’ but of ‘when’]":
On the opposite end of the spectrum from Will and the GSAs are the followers of Westboro Baptist Church’s Rev. Fred Phelps and his Godhatesfags.com website. Where Will Phillips refuses to recite the Pledge of Allegiance out of a sense of patriotism, meaning he expects the country to live up to the ideals it espouses, Westboro Baptists’ congregants express their own brand of patriotism by condemning the entire country simply for its limited and patchwork acceptance of LGBTs. Phelps’ followers, with many children among their numbers, appear at the funerals of military members who have fallen in Iraq or Afghanistan and wave signs declaring that they deserved their deaths since God has damned the United States. “God hates you” and “You will burn in Hell” appear on signs, often held by children of Will’s age and younger. According to their website they have held 41,226 “peaceful demonstrations (to date)” since their founding in 1991.
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While the good Reverend Phelps and his followers are the extreme, there are others among the younger generation who might also be “lost” as future allies for LGBTs. One of the potential drawbacks to the current wave of civil rights battles across the nation is that, while much of the younger generation will be learning that LGBT equality is a no-brainer there will be others whose parents and communities will be more pro-active in teaching their children to not accept their gay peers. Many of these kids attend anti-gay protests and take part in other anti-gay political actions, either willingly or at the behest of their parents. Many are being groomed to fill the leadership roles of groups such as Focus on the Family and National Organization for Marriage. In the past, many parents might have stewed in silence which allowed for their children to be influenced by pro-gay lessons, or at the very least to grow up neutral on the issue. But now there are countless parents who have been galvanized into action and want to ensure their kids learn to not see LGBT citizens as equal (at best).