Kayla Kenney posing in front of her birthday cake.CREDIT: Kimberly Alford Image cropped.

The story was tailor-made for our neo-pagan and anti-Christian time.

A girl attending a Christian school that required parents and students to agree to uphold some very orthodox Christian behaviors was expelled because a picture surfaced of her and a birthday cake which had icing in a rainbow pattern. This is from the Louisville (KY) Courier-Journal:

A Christian school in Louisville expelled a student last week after her family said school officials discovered the girl had celebrated her birthday with a rainbow-themed cake.

Kimberly Alford told The Courier Journal that until Jan. 6, her 15-year-old daughter had been a freshman at Whitefield Academy, a private school at 7711 Fegenbush Lane that serves students in preschool through 12th grade.

That’s when Alford said she received an email from Whitefield Academy’s head of school, Bruce Jacobson, explaining how her daughter was being expelled “immediately due to a post on social media.”

Alford had recently posted a photo on her Facebook page showing her daughter celebrating her birthday in late December at a Texas Roadhouse restaurant. In the photo, the girl is wearing a sweater featuring a rainbow design and sitting by a colorful, rainbow-themed cake.

The Washington Post, that would be the paper that could not be bothered to cover the Kermit Gosnell murder trial because it was a “local crime story,” picked up the story:

Kimberly Alford says she typically plans big birthday celebrations for her daughter. But when Kayla Kenney turned 15 late last month, the Louisville mother opted to organize a smaller gathering of friends and family at Texas Roadhouse, one of her daughter’s favorite restaurants.

Ahead of the party, Alford instructed a bakery to decorate a cake with colors that “pop,” she recalled. It just so happened that the cake’s rainbow motif mirrored the design on her daughter’s sweater, and she took a picture of Kayla smiling next to it to commemorate the Dec. 30 party.

Now, Alford alleges the seemingly innocuous photo caused Kayla to be expelled from Whitefield Academy, a private Christian school in Louisville, where her daughter was a freshman. In an email to the family on Jan. 6, the academy’s head of school, Bruce Jacobson, wrote that Kayla’s enrollment was terminated, effective immediately, because of a social media post.
…
Alford said she is aware that the rainbow-striped flag is a symbol of the LGBTQ community, but emphasized that her daughter’s matching rainbow cake and sweater were simply a coincidental aesthetic and not intended to mean anything more. The expulsion was first covered this week by local news outlets, including the Courier-Journal.

“Rainbows don’t mean you’re a certain gender or certain sex or sexuality,” Alford told The Washington Post, adding that she provided the school a receipt from the bakery listing the cake’s design as “assorted colors.” “I’m not saying she’s this or that — she’s just Kayla to me. … I ordered the cake, she didn’t.”
…
Alford acknowledged that Kayla had been disciplined for several behavioral issues in the past. She said her daughter was once caught with an e-cigarette and, in another instance, got in trouble after cutting out of school during lunch. The mother confirmed that her daughter was placed on probation in October and has since worked to improve her grades and correct her behavior.
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According to Whitefield Academy’s parent/student handbook, the school seeks to work in tandem with children’s families to “mold students to be Christ-like.”

“On occasion, the atmosphere or conduct within a particular home may be counter or in opposition to the Biblical lifestyle the school teaches,” the handbook says. “This includes, but is not limited to, sexual immorality, homosexual orientation, or the inability to support Biblical standards of right and wrong.”

In this, one the mother is rather emphatic that the girl is neither homosexual nor was their any message intended in the cake choice

and another

If you were a radical atheist out to discredit this particular school, this is precisely the narrative you’d want to establish. A fixation on sexual behavior. Stalking of students on social media. Lack of forgiveness. Pharisiticalism. An estrangement from secular culture. In fact, this is pretty much the narrative followed by the national media, including the same Washington Post, when some white boys at the Christian school where Vice President Mike Pence’s wife, Karen Pence, volunteers were accused of cutting the hair of a black girl. There they were not content to focus on the alleged assault, the agreement between the school and parents and students became a focus of their attention.

Rod Dreher at the American Conservative looked into the story. He found something markedly different.

The first clue is in the dismissal letter

We are sorry to inform you that due to a continued breach of our school policies and expectations, Kayla is being dismissed from Whitefield Academy, effective today, January 6, 2020. Please see the attached letter which serves as the official notice.

The [Whitefield Academy] Administration has been made aware of a recent picture, posted on social media, which demonstrates a posture of morality and cultural acceptance contrary to that of Whitefield Academy’s beliefs (see the attached picture). Per our in-person meeting on October 17, 2019, we made it clear that any further promotion, celebration, or any other actions and attitudes that are counter to Whitefield’s philosophy would not be tolerated. As a result, we regret to inform you that Kayla is being dismissed from the school, effective immediately.

There is obviously history here and an actual reporter would probably have taken the time to find out. From Dreher:

When Alford says her daughter “is no angel,” and confirms that she has had “disciplinary issues,” she’s understating matters. My understanding is that Kayla Kenney had a long, specific list of repeated infractions — bullying, disrespecting teachers, vaping in school (as Alford acknowledges), and so forth. Part of what she has allegedly done is promoting LGBT consciousness in the school, including aggression on that front. I’m trying to be delicate here, but I can tell you that she has transgressed against other students on this front, to promote bisexuality. For example, she allegedly drew rainbows and wrote slogans like “bi pride” on other kids’ papers, and gave at least two different girls the impression that she was sexually harassing them. Kayla has been presenting herself as gay on her Instagram account:

Here is Kayla, on the right, dressed as a male to take a female to another school’s dance. She posted this on her Instagram account:

[I HAVE REMOVED THIS IMAGE OUT OF POSSIBLE COPYRIGHT CONCERNS.]

This one — from October 16, 2019 — could hardly be more clear:

[I HAVE REMOVED THIS IMAGE OUT OF POSSIBLE COPYRIGHT CONCERNS. ON IT, SHE SAYS ‘ME COMING OUT’]

Another one from last year — mind you, this is months before her expulsion:

[I HAVE REMOVED THIS IMAGE OUT OF POSSIBLE COPYRIGHT CONCERNS. THE TEXT ON THE PHOTO READS ‘ME FINALLY GETTING A GF’ (GIRLFRIEND)]

December 30, 2019:

[I HAVE REMOVED THIS IMAGE OUT OF POSSIBLE COPYRIGHT CONCERNS. IT IS A PHOTO OF KAYLA AND ANOTHER GIRL, WITH THE TEXT, ‘BUT I WAS THE ONE IN HER BED….’]

Throwing her Bible in the dryer:

[I HAVE REMOVED THIS IMAGE OUT OF POSSIBLE COPYRIGHT CONCERNS.]
…
I am told that the disciplinary meeting the school administration had last October with Kimberly Alford included a specific warning that Kayla had better knock off promoting LGBT. A parent who believes his kid’s school is being trashed unfairly told me:

The picture that the media is having a firestorm over was a clear warning to mom and daughter. They willfully chose to promote something. They’re playing dumb, but we know exactly what they were trying to convey.

They obviously do. Kayla Kenney was openly advertising her lesbianism, or at least her bisexuality, and even claiming to have gone to bed with a female. Kimberly Alford told TODAY that her daughter “was really trying to clean up her behavior.” Bull. Kayla and her mother were plainly trolling Whitefield’s administration with that rainbow cake. As the school administrators have publicly said, the cake photo was the last straw after a long string of disciplinary issues with this kid.

Here are relevant sections from the parent/student agreement and the school handbook

In short, virtually nothing the mother told the press represented a complete picture of the issue and the school, unable to legally release the girl’s disciplinary record in order to defend their decision, had to sit and take the lie. Oh, wait, someone who was famous in some circles had something to say about this:

Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.

So what we have here is a girl, who is pushing the gay lifestyle to fellow students at a school that tells you upfront that that behavior is incompatible with school enrollment, and who makes here alleged sexuality a big deal on social media, and who has been counselled, along with her parents, about the consequences of her behavior, getting something that she and her parents have obviously wanted: media attention.

This girl has a right to engage in this behavior and these relationships if she wants because her parents obviously approve of their 15-year-old being sexually active (sorry, that ain’t the way it works at my house). What she does not have the right to do is to rub this behavior in the face of a school administration that is providing an environment that they have guaranteed other students is free of this sexual proselytizing.

Have any of the outlets who pushed this story published an update to correct the record? Of course not. The only reason they ran the story is to further the narrative of orthodox Christians being intolerant, judgmental bigots. The facts were there to be found long before they ran the original story.

The puzzling part of this is why a family would tolerate this kind of aggressively sexualized behavior from their kid and, knowing what they know, enroll her in a school where that behavior is specifically forbidden and from which she is predictably expelled. And use family income to do this.

What is for sure is that as the popular culture becomes more brazenly dissolute and more pagan, many parents are going to start voting with their feet and moving to either home schooling or religious based schools. This will not set well with those who intend to totally corrupt our culture and reduce faith to Obama’s cherished ‘freedom of worship.’ Because unless they possess our children, they are doomed to failure. To destroy this opt-out from the current culture, they will attempt to use the code of behavior that is essential to giving religious schools an ethical base for character formation as a weapon to attack those schools.