Excellent commentary on the issue over at TIME:
Still, it's hard to blame Lake County Schools for having wanted to do something — anything — to register its objection to Buell's homophobia and his statement's real potential to make Mount Dora an unfriendlier place for gay students, teachers and staff. "The one thing about social media in this case," says Calvert, "is that at least now people know who this individual really is." And here's where the district won a moral victory despite the futility of its legal effort. Some may argue that by investigating Buell and removing him from class those few days, school officials simply made him a free-speech martyr for hatemongers. But they also made an example of him by responding to his antigay outburst the same way they would have if he'd denigrated blacks or women.
As a result, they've done a lot in their pocket of Florida, if not the rest of the country, to make homophobia, not homosexuality, the sin that's unacceptable — even when its purveyors try to justify it as religious belief, and even when they try to soften it, as Buell has so often done in recent weeks, by claiming that while they hate homosexuality, they love homosexuals as God's children. That's not love; it's an insult. It smacks of the rhetoric often heard in the segregationist South, when whites of that era cited the Bible to back up their bigotry just as Buell turns to Romans 1: 26-27 as his own cover. It's one thing to disagree with gay marriage; it's quite another to malign gays and lesbians in the process.
A number of rules reportedly hang on the walls of Buell's Mount Dora classroom. Rule No. 1: respect. Another reads, "A cruel word cannot be unsaid." Buell has every legal right to be back at work — but if he's as good a teacher as he seems, his students should be smart enough to wonder if he really belongs there.
