Movie Day Gone Horribly Wrong!

There's controversy in Dallas!  Dallas public schools recently had movie day, and they took 5,700 elementary school boys to see the movie Red Tails, about the African-American fighter pilot squadron from WWII, while the girls were shown Akeelah and the Bee, a movie about an African-American girl who competes in a spelling bee.

Apparently, recognizing that boys and girls are not identical in every way is not acceptable anymore in this country.

A school spokesperson said that the school district often holds gender-specific events, so the showing of different movies to the boys and girls was "not out of the ordinary."  But one of the still-living pilots that Red Tails was based on said he was "almost speechless."  "I've heard of everything else, but this is the first time I've heard that [Red Tails] was inappropriate for female students," the former pilot said.  Does he think the school district is similarly saying that Akeelah and the Bee is inappropriate for boys?  The school was simply trying to make movie day as enjoyable as possible for the kids.  It would have been much easier to just show everyone Old Yeller, but instead, the school made more of an effort, coordinating the showing of separate movies to enhance movie day for the kids.

Maybe I'm missing something, but what is the big deal here??  Girls were shown a movie about a girl, and the boys watched a movie about war.  Sounds like the district made appropriate movie choices for the kids.  I mean, where do these people think phrases like "chick flick" came from - boys and girls have different tastes in lots of things, especially movies.

Instead of criticizing the school district for recognizing that boys like war movies and girls like dramas, I would expect them to be applauded for showing both the boys and the girls movies about African-American success stories.

I'm all for gender equality, but that doesn't mean there aren't gender differences.  Maybe we should start putting urinals in all the girls bathrooms, and men should stop helping the women open the jar of pickles.

Providing equal rights to different genders or races or religions doesn't mean we can't recognize their respective differences.  After all, isn't the whole point of diversity to celebrate equal but different qualities??  It would be a pretty boring world if everyone truly was identical in every way.

Read an article on the controversy here:

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/02/10/schoolgirls-excluded-from-dallas-screening-red-tails/?test=latestnews