Whitefield Academy, a private Christian school, expelled 15-year-old freshman Kayla Kenney for having the audacity to celebrate her birthday with a multi-colored cake while wearing a rainbow sweater.

Because everyone knows what that really means.

The girl’s mom, Kimberly Alford, told the Louisville Courier Journal that she had posted that picture from a birthday dinner on Facebook only to have the school’s leader, Bruce Jacobson, tell her that her daughter was being expelled.

Alford said someone shared the Facebook photo with Whitefield Academy officials. In the email, Alford said Jacobson wrote that the picture “demonstrates a posture of morality and cultural acceptance contrary to that of Whitefield Academy’s beliefs” and follows two years of “lifestyle violations.”

To be clear, there’s nothing in the picture that suggests the Alfords support LGBTQ civil rights, much less suggest that the girl is a lesbian. And apparently asking them about it wasn’t an option for the school. They basically just expelled Kayla for liking rainbows.

The school later said this was the tipping point after “two years of continuous violations of our student code of conduct”… but if wearing a rainbow sweater is considered a violation, what else did she do to provoke their wrath? Catch a baseball? Beat boys on a test? Suggest women also have rights?

The only concern they bring up is that the girl was caught with Juul pods in her backpack, but both school officials and her mother agreed to put her on “probation.” Wearing the sweater while on probation was apparently the last straw.

It’s all especially unusual when you consider how Christian fundamentalists like Ken Ham constantly remind us that they’re taking the rainbow back because it “represents the “everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.”

Who knew Ken Ham was the sort of person rebelling against crazy Christian authority?

The family appealed the school’s decision, but the appeal was rejected. They merely downgraded her punishment from expulsion — which might have looked worse on her permanent record — to “voluntary withdrawal.”

The good news is that the family has now enrolled her in a public school — a place where she can get a real education instead of more indoctrination into whatever cult thinks the sight of a rainbow is blasphemous.

(Screenshot via WAVE. Thanks to everyone for the link)

