A Christian school that tried to shame a gay student just admitted defeat

Tennessee Christian Preparatory School punished Morgan Armstrong after she came out. A year later, the school has agreed to pay her $10,000.

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In a stunning turn of events, a Christian high school in Tennessee has agreed to pay a former student $10,000 after denying her the chance to walk at graduation, which they did after she publicly came out as a lesbian and suggested some of her more conservative/Trump-y relatives may not take the news well.

I first wrote about Morgan Armstrong last year, but the story is so damn amazing, I’m reposting it here with relevant updates.

Morgan was a high school senior and star basketball player last year, but just before she was set to graduate, administrators told her family they needed to have a meeting.

Morgan Armstrong (via Facebook)

Turns out they had seen a public post on Morgan’s Facebook page highlighting her same-sex relationship. She posted it shortly after turning 18.

Administrators had also seen a private message posted for her Snapchat friends asking them to “like” her post because she had a lot of Trump-supporting acquaintances. That message, which one student must have leaked to school officials, said: “Go like and comment on my post guys bc if no one on my socials knew i was gay then they sure as hell do now so this is a big thing tbh, also i’m kinda scared about the facebook comments bc i have some ruthless trump supporting ‘jesus’ mfs on there.”

It was clear what she meant by that. There are a lot of conservative Christian bigots who might respond to her post by telling her she’s some kind of sinner who needs Jesus. Not all Christians are bigots, obviously, but the Trump-supporting ones? Gotta watch out for them. And she had people in her life who fit that description.

I knew what she was saying. You knew what she was saying. But why did the school give a damn what she was saying?

Simple: Morgan attended Tennessee Christian Preparatory School, one of those schools where “homosexual behavior” is not allowed. But that’s not why she was in trouble, apparently. According to the adults at the school, the problem was acknowledging the open cruelty of Trump supporters. They said she violated their Social Media Policy by disparaging those bigots… because she was effectively disparaging them.

Armstrong and her father said they met with principal Kylie Machacek and head of schools Jared Tilley.

Armstrong said the school presented the family with a letter, referring to the post and the private message that they had obtained. That letter read, “Morgan posted on social media platforms, such as Instagram, a disparaging remark, reflecting the people at Tennessee Christian. The comment reflected on the institution, facility, staff, alumni and students in the most negative possible way.”

If you read a post calling out conservative Christian bigots and your first response is, “How dare she talk about us like that?”… then maybe you’re the problem.

She didn’t mention the school, or any of her teachers, or any of her classmates in any of those posts. She correctly pointed out there were assholes out there—there are!—and the school overreacted by assuming she was targeting them.

The school’s policy says students cannot post anything that’s “threatening, harassing, illegal, obscene, defamatory, slanderous, harassing, bullying, or hostile towards any individual or entity.” But she wasn’t “defamatory” or “slanderous” or even “hostile” regarding what bigots do; she described them accurately! So what was the big deal?

In any case, because of their overreaction, the school officials banned Morgan from attending graduation as well as any end-of-season athletic banquet.

They also told her they’d mail her the diploma in a month because they refused to give it to her on stage.

Then they threatened to sabotage her future by sending proof of her posts to her prospective colleges, like some kind of bizarre academic blackmail.

Morgan will not comment about the school or people associated with the school. If online slander continues, records of posts and messages will be forwarded to colleges and universities as part of a comprehensive student file.

Again, she never slandered the school or anyone in it. But if she continued, the school insisted, she wouldn’t get her diploma at all.

Her parents, who were both openly in support of their daughter, couldn’t believe it:

“I was shocked and then I went to anger,” said Monica Armstrong, Morgan’s mother.

I want to reiterate that the school didn’t comment on her relationship—even though, deep down, you just know that’s what this was all about. They focused on her (honest) admission that conservative bigots wouldn’t like it… which they took as a personal insult for some reason. Because of that interpretation, they were threatening to punish her with whatever leverage they still had.

But the school made a huge mistake.

While private Christian schools have every right to set their own ridiculous policies, the expectation is that they’re at least going to honor what both sides agreed to in writing.

That created a problem for administrators. Because even if you believe Morgan violated the school’s rules, the school’s handbook said a first-time violation for breaking their Social Media Policy was, at worst, a one-day in-school suspension. Not banning someone from attending her own graduation and refusing to hand over the diploma she earned.

By going from 0 to 60 at the first sign of pushback, the school was ignoring its own stated rules.

That’s why Morgan’s family filed a lawsuit against the Christian school. They said the letter she received “falsely” stated she was insulting people at the school.

Nothing in Morgan’s public post was vulgar, disrespectful, or slanderous, and the post does not refer to the Defendant in any respect.

They said the same thing about her private Snapchat request—she wasn’t talking about the school or the people in it. She was referring to bigots in her extended family, not good kind Christians. (And surely the folks at Tennessee Christian Preparatory School are good kind Christians, right?)

Instead, Morgan’s statement describing “some ruthless trump supporting ‘jesus’ mfs” referred to members of Morgan’s own family with whom she was connected on social media—people who, in Morgan’s view, profess but do not practice Christian principles of love, acceptance, and compassion.

This section, in my mind, is what everything boiled down to:

52. Even assuming, for the sake of argument, that Morgan actually violated the Defendant’s Social Media Policy (she did not) and was not disciplined pretextually for being gay (she was), because Morgan had never before been disciplined for violating the Defendant’s Social Media Policy, the maximum consequence that the Defendant could permissibly impose for a first-time Social Media Policy violation was “minor”—a “1 day in-school suspension.”

53. Nevertheless, in its haste to suspend Morgan for being gay, the Defendant violated its own Disciplinary Policy and summarily imposed a “Long-term suspension (more than 10 days)” instead.

54. As a result, Morgan was forbidden from attending school from that point forward, and she was not permitted to take final exams.

You have to wonder what the school thought it would accomplish by punishing one of its best students for something so harmless. Instead of giving her the sendoff she deserved, they ruined what should have been highlights of her high school experience.

The lawsuit ended with a request that, if the school lost the case, they remove the suspension from her record, allow her to take her final exams, give her the damn diploma, stop threatening her college prospects, and pay any associated legal costs. (The school said she didn’t have to take the final exams, and they wouldn’t hold it against her grade-wise. Still, if she scored well on them, it could have improved her grade point average. That’s why she really wanted a chance to show what she could do.)

At the time, the school issued a press release “firmly [rejecting] the misleading allegations outlined in a recent lawsuit supposedly filed against the school.”

The irony in all this was, by punishing Morgan over nothing, the administrators confirmed what critics of Christian schools often say: These institutions are hotbeds of bigotry. They have no love for LGBTQ students. They pressure students to suppress their emotions. They make a big deal over little things while ignoring much more serious problems.

It’s mind-boggling that any private school would rather withhold a student’s diploma for expressing genuine concern about the inevitable reactions to her relationship than just let it slide because no reasonable person would actually give a damn.

The silver lining to all this was that there was an overwhelmingly positive response on behalf of Morgan. News outlets covered the story and any neutral explanation of what happened made the school look absolutely horrible. But they brought this upon themselves. That’s the price you pay when bigotry is your biggest selling point.

Meanwhile, Morgan’s family held a small protest/celebration on the day she was supposed to be graduating with her classmates:

A graduation celebration for Morgan Armstrong (screenshot via WSMV)

When I spoke to Morgan last year, I learned a lot more about her situation than the media coverage revealed.

For example, the biggest question I had was why she ended up going to a conservative Christian school in the first place. If she and her parents were relatively progressive on LGBTQ issues, what drew them there? That answer was extremely straightforward: The school offered Morgan a spot on their basketball team back in middle school along with a partial scholarship to go with it, and her family decided that was an offer they couldn’t turn down. While they are Christian, they didn’t see their values as clashing with the school’s idea of religion… until now. When it came to how she felt about Christianity, Morgan told me, “this situation definitely didn’t help.”

I also wondered why she decided to post the pictures of her and her girlfriend in the spring instead of just waiting a month or two until she was finally done with high school. Morgan said she did that on purpose. She had known for years that she’s attracted to other girls, and she’s also known her school disapproves of that, and “I didn’t want that fear to hold me down anymore.” Plus, she added, her straight friends posted pictures with their boyfriends and girlfriends all the time. So why couldn’t she?

That’s also why she filed the lawsuit. Even if the school won’t change its stance on homosexuality, she didn’t want them to target anyone else in the future like they did to her. In fact, she received so many messages and calls of support from former students at her school who are now openly LGBTQ. She wanted the “continuous cycle” of shame and hate to end.

It wasn’t all supportive, though. Morgan said her friends at school mostly blocked her on social media after this controversy went public. Maybe that’s to avoid the wrath of the school’s prying eyes, but it’s not like they contacted her privately either to let her know they were still on her side.

The irony, she said, was that many of them had known she was gay for years. It was only after this story went viral that they decided to cut their ties. Her girlfriend Sophie, however, was right there with her. (It must have been hard to watch Morgan go through all this, but the two were still as close as ever.)

When we spoke, Morgan didn’t know where she’d go to college. She figured she wouldn’t be playing basketball anywhere, but for her sake, I hoped she would end up in a place where she would be accepted and not treated as some kind of outcast.

I had mostly forgotten about this story, assuming nothing much would come of it. I figured Morgan would go to college, the school wouldn’t admit any wrongdoing, and both sides would move on.

I was wrong.

This week, her attorney Daniel A. Horwitz announced that the two sides had reached a settlement. While the two sides “disagree” on whether Morgan violated school policies, the school has retroactively rescinded her suspension. Administrators also said they never trashed Morgan to any of her prospective colleges and promise never to do so in the future.

And the school said they’d pay her $10,000. Which is essentially the amount for tuition for a single year (even though Morgan had received at least a partial scholarship).

In an interview Horwitz told me “this is as good a result as—perhaps an even better result than—the court system could have provided in a litigated judgment. Paired with the rescission of her suspension, her receipt of her diploma, and the permanent injunction involved, this was a total, spectacular win.”

Horwitz, who worked on this case pro bono, added in a press release:

… “School is a place where every student is entitled to feel welcome, accepted, and supported.”

Horwitz continued, “It is not a place where any administrator should feel comfortable disciplining or threatening kids for being gay. We were proud to represent Morgan and her family in this righteous lawsuit, and we are thrilled to have prevailed on their behalf. We hope Morgan’s bravery will inspire others to stand up for themselves the way that she did.”

I also had a chance to catch up with Morgan yesterday. She told me she was just glad everything was over since this issue had taking up a lot of space in her brain over the past year.

She’s currently attending a college online while working a full-time job, making a clean break from her high school and the area where she grew up. And she’s still with Sophie, who’s been supportive throughout this whole ordeal.

When we spoke last year, she told me she was on the fence about her Christian faith, saying “this situation definitely didn’t help.” So where was she on that now? “I’m still questioning,” she told me, adding that she was probably “leaning to the not-believing side.” When so many of your interactions with Christians are as negative as the ones she’s had, it’s hard to argue with that.

It’s also the same reason she’s not particularly close to the people she attended high school with. Many of them had blocked her on social media last year when everything went down. I figured some of them would come around after the controversy subsided… but they didn’t. Morgan said they still have her blocked and the feeling is mutual. “At first, it was a bad thing,” she said, but these days, she’s “made peace with it. What’s done is done.” (She’s building a new life in a new city, and that may be the healthiest option.)

The biggest thing she wanted to say was that she had seen chatter on social media that she did this for attention or money. But no one asks for this kind of attention, and she never wanted money from the school anyway. (Remember, it was the school that offered money as part of the settlement.) There was only one reason Morgan wanted to go through with this lawsuit, she explained: “It was about standing up for what happened. My only goal was to clear my record.”

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