I’ve written often on culture, social media, and the consequences of both (e.g. Anti-bullying: There’s an app for that & Facebook Rules for Pastors and How Twitter Makes me a Better Pastor at WorkingPreacher.org). Well today I’m featuring a guest post written for A Wee Blether by Andrew Hall that explores what happens when social media and homophobia combine.

by Andrew Hall

Andrew Hall is a guest blogger for My Dog Ate My Blog and a writer on Online Degree for Guide to Online Schools.

Either I don’t understand Little Rock, Arkansas, or Clint McCance doesn’t understand how the internet works. In the wake of many national news stories about gay teenagers having killed themselves as a consequence of bullying and harassment, McCance, a Little Rock school board representative, used Facebook to single-handedly end his time on the school board.

To do so, he responded to a call to wear purple in support of LGBT by writing back “Seriously they want me to wear purple because five queers killed themselves. The only way im wearin it for them is if they all commit suicide. I cant believe the people of this world have gotten this stupid. We are honoring the fact that they sinned and killed thereselves because of their sin. REALLY PEOPLE,” then followed this with another rant explaining that he liked how homosexuals “often give each other aids and die,” then followed this with yet another that explains how he would “disown [his] kids [if] they were gay [… I would] absolutely run them off. My kids will have solid christian beliefs.” In addition to espousing blatantly homophobic language, McCance also demonstrates his basic inability to write functionally in the English language, not at all befitting someone intended to represent educational institutions in any school system that predominantly works in English.

McCance’s comments are somewhat unbelievable. It’s hard to imagine that someone in 2010 would truly not understand the implications for one’s career in posting something of this sort on Facebook, where both personal and professional acquaintances (and their friends) can easily see it, take screenshots of it, share it with one’s employers, the national media, and anyone and everyone else who might want to use it as an opportunity to try to end McCance’s career. If you truly must, however, you can account this to a generational gap, and McCance’s misguided belief that his comments wouldn’t easily find an audience ready to jump on them being a consequence of his not having grown up with an online public social life.

What that reading doesn’t account for, however, is the fact that McCance exists, or believes he exists, in a culture in which comments that heavily use negative epithets to refer to homosexuals are completely and totally acceptable when said not by professional bigots, but by people who supposedly have the interests of a city’s very young people at heart. That McCance was willing to post his multipart rant at all is indicative of the fact that he believed that there was no problem at all with what he was saying (especially given that the horrifically bad writing indicates that he didn’t take a minute to edit it), and this is a clear consequence of a culture of long-established homophobia in McCance’s world, possibly in Little Rock, and elsewhere.

This is a clear case of social networking revealing someone’s worst qualities as a human being (and being done in professionally by it). This does not, unfortunately, get us closer to resolving the issues at its center.

Andrew Hall is a guest blogger for My Dog Ate My Blog and a writer on Online Degree for Guide to Online Schools.The image is by Laura.