Kilt Killing Public School Craziness

Rather than encouraging a student to embrace history, culture and knowledge, a high school principal in The Show-Me State shows us he's a first-class ass:

Nathan Warmack wanted to honor his heritage by wearing a Scottish kilt to his high school dance. Then a principal told him to change into a pair of pants.

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Warmack, a defensive lineman on the football team, lives in Jackson, a growing, largely middle-class city of about 14,000 people about 110 miles from St. Louis.

He got interested in his family's Scottish ties after seeing Mel Gibson's 1995 movie "Braveheart," about William Wallace's battle to overthrow English rule in 13th century Scotland. Warmack reads books about Scotland and visits Web sites to learn more about his family's genealogy.

He bought a kilt off the Internet to wear to his school's formal "Silver Arrow" dance in November. Warmack said he showed it to a vice principal before the dance, who joked he'd better wear something underneath it, and Warmack assured him he would.

The school's principal, Rick McClard, however, had other ideas. At the dance, he ordered Warmack to change. The boy refused, saying he was honoring his heritage. The principal -- who you just know is like almost all high school principals: a control freak with zero personality and even less humor who gets off on bossing kids around because no adults will listen to him and probably beat the hell out of him on the playground way back in the day -- handled the incident with true class:

Warmack alleges McClard told him: "Well, this is my dance, and I'm not going to have students coming into it looking like clowns."

A clown? Yes, a clown. Now imagine this McClard -- Mc-Lard, get it (see he even had one of those names that get you beat up on the playground -- saying to an African-American student wearing this that he or she looks like a clown ... or to an Arab student wearing this. Imagine the uproar.

Yet, Warmack has the misfortune of being Scottish, which have no defenders in the ACLU-loving chattering classes. Instead, the school system superintendent (who, no doubt, was also beaten up as a child and is not only a control freak but a power-hungry one) backs the principal for eliminating a "distraction."

To which one observer remarked: A distraction "from what? From the intense concentration it takes to dance?"

So forget those plummeting test scores. Ignore the "oral-sex-in-the-bathroom" stories. Let's concentrate on what matters: Eliminating those "clownish kilts" from our public schools! Take a few moments and sign this petition supporting young Nathan and his interest in his heritage. And here's hoping Nathan reads the Scottish Declaration of Independence, signed in 1320, which in part reads: "We fight not for glory nor for wealth nor honours; but only and alone we fight for freedom, which no good man surrenders but with his life."