A high school artist called out Christian bigotry. Her school board is furious. (Livestream) 

Telling queer kids to respect Christian homophobic adults is like telling sheep to respect wolves

If you don't like being called a bigot, don't be a bigot. Easy peasy. 😊

"Shining a light on bigotry usually angers bigots." Fantastic quote

*_"Just because you're 'offended' doesn't mean you're right."_*

Conservative Christians: "We don't care if we offend you" Also Conservative Christians: *Get offended themselves* "*Gasp* How DARE you!"

Nooo we cant have children expressing themselves, it hurts my feelings to be called a bigot!

If it’s an art contest, she won. Even if she doesn’t get the most votes…she still won because it’s the one being talked about the most.

That artist just had the highest compliment an artist can receive. To be BANNED. Good job!!

You get called out by an artist, so you then show the behaviour, that the artist is calling out. 😳

I’m Australian and I am amazed at the way Americans go on about “free speech” in one breath and then pull this sort of censorship over a high school art piece about social justice. It’s Stratospheric levels of hypocrisy . I don’t get it, it’s weird.

I’m a gay man in my 60’s, I grew up in a small city and in an extended fundamentalist Protestant family (mostly Plymouth Brethren or Baptist’s). The late Jerry Falwell Snr on occasion preached in our family church and you get the flavor. Way back then gays simply ‘did not exist’ in that it was never talked about, but on the rare occasions when same sex relationships came to the fore then there was collective horror at this ‘abomination’ and it was reinforced that gays were going to hell. As a teenager I remember listening to a church youth group discussion when the then girlfriend (now wife) of my first cousin said that in her opinion homosexuality was the ‘worst’ type of sin and my cousin said that in his opinion it was the second worst since murder/war was the worst! Needless to say I never came out until I had left town for university and never gone back.

Did a student make the artwork? Yes. Does it encourage bullying or contain nudity? No. So the school board has zero reason to intervene.

"culture of respect" that is code for white christian culture, not a culture of respect for all people.

They hated her because she spoke the truth

'Your not expressing yourself the way I demand you too' is not a legal qualifier for removing a child's art work from an art display.

"A culture of respect" is a wonderful idea; just make sure it includes everyone. If a queer kid can't go to school without constantly watching their back, that's pretty disrespectful

"Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable." /Banksy

So not only can she be discriminated against by religious organizations but she can loose her constitutional rights about free speech too , thanks evangelical America!!!

He wrote: "...For now, the art work in question will be removed by the time students arrive back at school on Monday as the art show ends on Sunday." Someone replied: "Imagine believing you have the right to go through life without seeing anything that might offend you. Imagine trampling over the rights of others just to make sure there’s no possibility you might be offended. "And imagine deciding that, because you don’t want to see something, NO ONE should be able to see it. "What arrogance. "As far as the culture of respect you mentioned, I hope that applies to LGBTQ students as well. They deserve to be respected as human beings and creations of God."

This artist should immediately start selling this piece of work as posters all over the internet.

The irony of the school name being Fort Defiance is just pure gold.

Remember everyone even if you didn't have a child you need to vote these people out of your local school board when you can. They're insane

It’s illegal for the school board to meet in private on a matter of public interest. They all need to be recalled.

“Oh no, someone shattered my safe space with a work of art that expresses ideas that make me feel uncomfortable! My rights are being violated by this hate speech!” What’s hateful about it? “It says something I don’t like!”

As someone said, being offended does not make you a victim.

i can hear the loving christians shouting' burn the witch!'

I love how this work of art condemns being suppressed by Christian ideology. And the Christians' reaction to this is: "This is disrespectful! We must suppress this!" Without even the slightest recognition of the massive irony.

And they call us sensitive snowflakes.

That's literally what Christianity teaches. Her only mistake was saying the quiet part loud. Christians are getting offended by their own scriptures.

This is worse than ridiculous. The artist expressed what she had been taught in church and learned from her environment. Now she's criticized for reproducing reality in the art. What a reprehensible school board!

It's wild that a book gets better treatment than actual human beings.

Separation of church and state! As a person who believes in a creator, I'm aghast at the surge of Christian nationalism.

The backlash proved the message. Well done Abby. 🖖💚🌈

"A student who wished to remain anonymous reached out to WHSV saying they felt the artwork was offensive, and said it made a mockery for Christianity." Christianity makes a mockery of itself!

Emergency school board meeting at 9:00 pm Saturday night behind closed doors? I'm surprised, why not in the woods with white hats and flames?

The “fuck your feelings” side of the table sure does catch the feels a lot. Feelings hurt enough that they arrange laws to comfort themselves

The artwork caused controversy, started a conversation about rights, and went viral. That's the type of success most artists only dream of

Bigotry is offensive and dangerous to society.

They shriek "look, the gay agenda!", pointing at an artistic representation of the suffering of someone they consider "not us", mouth agape. "This cannot stand!" And thus, more people understand the importance of the piece, by several orders of magnitude.

If someone had written Westborough Baptist slogans on their art, like, "God Hates ****", the school board would have defended them. "She has a right to free speech! These are her deeply held convictions! You may not like them, but she has a right to say them!"

Gee, why are younger people leaving the Church?

The irony....the school had just highlighted this young artist's talent. Let's hope she gets her own art show.

The reaction of the school board proves her point.

The students art is well composed and it’s symbolism is strong. You can immediately understand the message without reading the description. As an artist one of the greatest compliments to your art is that it touches people emotionally and make people reflect. Bravo! Hopefully your school board will eventually reconsider. Best of luck with your future Abby! I Hope to see more of your art.

Good for Abby. I fully support her. Religion poisons everything, every single time.

I would never have seen this artwork if these bigots hadn't amplified it. I felt the same way growing up queer, and this art resonated with me so powerfully! I'm free from religious indoctrination now, and life is so much better. Thank you Abby, stay strong!

They are proving her point.

They wouldn't have cared at all if she'd torn up a Quran or Torah for an art piece, they're just making excuses to silence her work.

School boards in the USA are the biggest obstacle to learning and education .

Typical bigots. Censor everything they don't like 🙄 anyway, I'm an artist too and now I have some new inspiration 💙

This story is wild. For one, it’s a school show, and the level of outrage from all of these adults is baffling. I’d also like to add that for a HS student the artwork is surprisingly good. It shows what she wanted in a very clear way, the use of colours and imagery portrays the feelings she wanted, and just all in all I really like it.

There's no love like Christian hate.

Has this not done exactly what free speech is designed to do? Make you think? Make you feel? Wow. Awesome.

Streisand effect, the more you try to publicly censore something, the more attention it attracts.

So, the schoolboard wants pictures, not art. Art provokes emotions and we can't have that in a school, I guess.

The school has not shown any respect for the artist.

As far as Christians are concerned, respect is a one-way street.

"Stop disrespecting me; I'm the tyrant here."

She wants people to think? BLASPHEMY!

First as a southerner, do not speak for me. As a Christian do not speak for me. I love the artwork. The artist expressed what many feel extremely well. JUST SPEAKING FOR MYSELF, God wants us to love one another and goes on to explain what love is. Those who do not do this is committing a sin. This is the difference between a church member and a Christian. I have gay family members and if any church member that tries that with them then I will have to lay hands on them. My fellow Christians, WE NEED TO SAY SOMETHING WHEN WE SEE OUR CHURCH MEMBERS DOING SOMETHING LIKE THIS.

Being disrespectful to religion, any religion, is still free speech.

School board: “We REALLY want to ban this but don’t want to get sued.”

For Christians, the biggest problem possible is being held accountable for their own actions.

That's an Ethel Cain quote. That's fantastic.

It's ironic, depressing and hilarious that some of the Christians reacted EXACTLY as the painting comments on.

Well, that kid is officially a famous artist now.

The "problem" is how to maintain our bigotry without being called out

There's no hate like "Christian love".

If they ban offensive religious speech, then depictions of Jesus and Adam would be disallowed as that would be offensive in Islam (as depictions of any prophet are not allowed).

There's nothing more useless than prayer. She NAILED it.

Faith-based bigotry is still bigotry.

It was a Karen. It makes them feel important in their unimportant little lives.

"we'll find a way to prevent any future issues" = we're gonna try to find a way to legally stifle our students' speech

Me (an adult): Oh look an art I don't like... *walks on to next art* Them: Evil art! Burn it! My eyeeeeees!!!

The art is treated the same way by the thing it critiques. Very prophetical art. Quality

The people who scream "FREEDOM" actually revere _conformity._

Their response to Abby's art instantaneously makes it successful, in terms of what good art is supposed to do.

That discussion, about a publicly displayed piece of art by a public student, should have been held in PUBLIC! Not behind secret closed doors where the members could voice bigotry comfortably.

"Culture of Respect" = Respect only for Conservative Christians. Respect them like they are your authority, or they will not respect you as a human. That's what they seem to want, and that's what they're trying to enforce.

So the problem is that it's "offensive". NOT that it's not correct. How dare a person raised in a religious tradition which rejects her for being queer, correctly point that fact out! So-called 'christians' should ALWAYS get a free pass for the damage they cause...

If they want a culture of respect, then they should make Christian culture more respectful.

A TRUE person of faith would have embraced that girl and apologized for the treatment they received at the hands of other people of "Faith".

I'm a formally-trained professional artist, and I spent the overwhelming bulk of my childhood in northern Georgia, hours outside of Atlanta. My family moved there from New Jersey when I was very young. At least nominally, they were Protestant-- but my parents were not active churchgoers, and by the time I reached high school, I had pretty firmly established myself as an agnostic. And let me tell you, being a teenaged agnostic in the heart of the Bible Belt is fuuuun. I am _well_ aware, on a firsthand basis, how unfriendly some Christians can be toward ideologies or lifestyles that aren't their own. Anyway, when I was a high school senior, I had a similar thing happen to me. I was in an AP art course, building a portfolio for college, because I knew even then that I wanted to pursue art as a career. The AP art students were pretty much left to their own self-directed projects, which was a nice degree of freedom that the other art students didn't have; we could even bring in our CD players and headphones and listen to whatever music we liked while we worked. Being an angsty 17-year-old, one of the pieces I produced was a colored pencil drawing of a flaming fanged skeleton with a scythe in one hand and an excised human heart clutched in the other, which I titled "Inevitability". (I cringe even recounting it, because I'm acutely aware how very 'angsty, Hot Topic-wearing, nu metal-listening teen' it was.) It was meant as a memento mori sort of piece, a commentary on the eventuality of death-- no specific religious connotations intended. When it came time for the AP art students to have a mid-year exhibition, and for each of us to pick one of our pieces to display in the school's drama department, I picked that one-- mostly because I'd been focusing on skeleton studies a lot that semester to improve my familiarity with human anatomy, and I genuinely felt it was the best piece to represent the progress I had made. However, when the show finally went up, I noticed my piece was conspicuously absent. When I asked my art teacher why, I was told that one of the other members of the faculty had seen it and objected to its presence on the grounds that it was "Satanic". So my artwork was booted from the show, because I'd managed to offend someone. While I was of course a bit disappointed about my work not being displayed... I took the whole incident as a badge of honor. My feeling was, and still is, if you aren't eliciting emotional reactions from people, you're not really doing your job or fulfilling your responsibility as an artist. I sincerely hope this young lady isn't discouraged by this, and if she decides to continue following her passions, I wish her a long and successful career. She's already doing the most important thing-- being true to herself, and provoking discussion.

Sad they think God's love is conditional. My love of my children is unconditional.

In a way, her message applies to Christianity as a whole.. The Chistian message is that God doesn't love you enough to save you, you have to ask to be saved and make a deal with Jesus. The religion is transactional. Wouldn't an all-loving god save everyone without any conditions?

The attitude of most forms of Christianity, at least up until very recently, has been exactly the same for all forms of difference: religious, cultural, sexual, you name it. Unless you totally renounce what makes you different and accept the only "right way" you are damned. In the United States one only needs look at the history of Christianity among American Indians.

Worked for a USA public school, so much of it is dealing with upset parents over ANY topic. Even something as simple as needing to change the lunch menu due to supply issues, because it's a little hard to prepare food you don't have.

Funnily enough you could argue that the intervention in an art class by people who don't understand the function of art COULD be viewed as affecting the education process

I live in Staunton VA which is about ten minutes from Verona. There are many people here who think Abby’s artwork is amazing and are cheering her on to great success in her career!

The artist proved her point indeed.

And Abby didn’t say gay once, nor talked about curly hair. Well done, Abby!

They should file a hurt feelings complaint

"This picture attacks MY BELIEFS, and only I, am supposed to have the right to do that to everybody else, because I'm a Christian and I have MORE RIGHTS, than everybody else." Is what they believe.

The school board member that was so offended by this artwork just achieved making the artwork reach a much larger audience than it otherwise would have. Bravo to Abby Driscoll for creating such an evocative piece of art. I hope they capitalize on this publicity by offering to sell prints of their artwork.

That piece is gonna sell for big money

High school art can get weird. I brought in a piece to show my art teacher. She wanted me to TRAVEL WITH HER to a high school art competition with the piece. I said no, and my piece was somehow stolen! I got it back AFTER the art competition. So, so weird.

Abby is a talented artist. The world will be enriched by their work

This is the county I grew up in. I went to public school there and once a week, we literally had a bible study where we walked outside to a trailer that was placed on directly on the edge of the school property. We were required to get permission from our parents, and this was apparently the result of a supreme court case saying that it was legal to do it this way. In 4th grade, I just went along with it. In 5th grade, I did not take the permission slip home to get it signed. On the first day of bible study, me and the one Mormon kid stayed in our desks while everyone else got up to happily go to bible study. My teacher (who also went to the church I was forced to go to) was not happy so she sent me to the principal's office. I explained to him that I did not want to go to bible study, I wanted to learn math. He called my mother (who was super pissed at me) who gave him verbal permission for me to go. I told him that I did not want to go and surprisingly enough, he actually listened to me. He told me to go back to my class. No questions asked. He also praised me (I was still 9 years old, almost 10) for taking a stand for well thought out reasons. Mom was really pissed when I got home, but she eventually realized that my will was stronger than hers in this matter and never really brought it up again.

As a Christian I am so sick of homophobes. Jesus said love everyone, he did NOT say only straight people!

If you think this is bad, just wait until a second Trump term. Incoming hellscape on the horizon..