After senior Abby Driscoll created art highlighting how Christians can make LGBTQ students feel, the Augusta County School Board vowed to take action.

May 07, 2024

Talk about an overreaction: Members of the Augusta County School Board in Verona, Virginia have decided a new policy needs to be created after a high school art student offended their sensibilities by using her work to highlight faith-based bigotry.

The piece of art in question was created by Abby Driscoll, a senior at Fort Defiance High School. The background features pages from the Bible while the foreground shows praying hands clasping a rosary. There are blood stains in rainbow colors. The text reads, “God loves you… but not enough to save you.”

(Follow above article link to view photos/PDFs that accompany this article.)

In her “artist statement,” Driscoll explained what she was hoping to convey (along with how she would assess her own artwork):

This piece is representative of the idea that growing up queer meant you couldn’t be saved by God. I grew up in a religious background and that influenced this project. The idea of the glowing red cross is to represent evil in the eyes of God and the bleeding rainbow represents devotion vs identity. Overall the piece gets across the message I want it to, even if it is a little in your face. I wish I had made the rosary more detailed but I’m glad I spent most of my time in the hands and drips. I think this was a successful piece and states what I want it to.

You don’t have to be an artist to appreciate the symbolism. There’s no doubt that LGBTQ students, especially in the South, have been made to feel like God doesn’t love them no matter what Christians say to the contrary. Their options are to change who they are or suffer the (eternal) consequences.

Like any good piece of art, it’s a starting point for further discussion. And on Sunday, that work was supposed to be featured in an art show that focused on the theme of trauma. (It’s not clear if all the works were by Driscoll or if her contribution was one of many exhibits.)

But then Timothy M. Simmons heard about it.

The school board member announced that “several people” had contacted him about the artwork and that, like them, he was deeply offended by it.

Several people have reached out to me regarding the art show on Sunday at Fort Defiance High School and a specific piece of art that is slated to be in the show. This particular piece of art is seen as offensive to some, including myself. The School Board has called a special meeting tonight at 9:00 pm to discuss. The meeting will be held in closed session, however any vote on the matter will take place publicly.

This is a sensitive topic with various dynamics at play and I will do my best to handle it as such.

The School Board is working with our legal counsel and I am currently reviewing the Supreme Court rulings relevant to this situation.

I will also be asking for a review on the process for approving pieces that are included in the art shows. Is there a process in place and, if so, how do we honor students’ free speech while also creating a culture of respect within our schools.

First of all, how the hell do all these people know about the specifics of artwork at a local high school? And how do people get so worked up over a student’s project that they demand a response from a school board member? That’s hard to believe.

It’s even more bizarre that the school board called a special session to deal with this—on a Saturday night, no less. (Was this painting so controversial that it required a rapid response?!)

And how deluded do you have to be as a school board member to think you need to personally review Supreme Court decisions in order to find an answer?

The student is fine. The school board is a hot mess full of delusional, thin-skinned adults.

If anything, they proved her point. The feelings that many LGBTQ students have as a direct consequence of Christian bigotry is a perfectly valid subject for a piece of art, whether it’s a painting, an essay, or a monologue. And when the school board flips out over an innocuous painting depicting that tension, it just shows how shining a light on bigotry offends bigots. You don’t need to go to SCOTUS for advice on that! Call it freedom of speech, but this is hardly some overly offensive, purposely provocative statement that the school must prevent anyone from seeing.

In a separate comment on Facebook, Simmons said he was looking at the Tinker ruling from 1969… which is odd since the justices in that case said that students had every right to express themselves provided they weren’t interrupting the educational process… which, as far as I can tell, this artwork was not doing. So, again, there’s nothing that needs to be done regarding the district’s policies.

But the “special session” happened anyway.

On Saturday night, the board members announced that the painting could stay in the art show, BUT they would consider revising district rules in the future to prevent something like this from ever happening again… because I guess the last thing they want in this district are students who can reflect upon injustice and spark important conversations.

When the board came out of the closed session, which lasted just shy of an hour and a half, Chair David Shiflett thanked the board members for their discussion on the issues.

"The result of the meeting is that the board decided not to take any action on the art display," Shiflett said. "We did however decide that we will, moving forward, we will look at possible policy adjustments or other possible solutions to help remedy a problem like this in the future."

They want to remedy “a problem like this.”

WHAT WAS THE PROBLEM?!

There was no problem.

These people created their own problem and now believe it’s their responsibility to solve it.

Simmons had his own take on the meeting. He didn’t use the same word, but he said the board needed to address “issues like this going forward.” (What “issues”? Who knows.)

He added that a “culture of respect” needed to be maintained at school, though he never detailed how this work of art violated that. If calling out injustice hurts people’s feelings, that’s their problem. (The same principle can be applied to teaching children about systemic racism. If you’re bothered by that, too damn bad.)

Apparently it’s disrespectful to Christians when queer students point out how hateful those Christians appear. It’s telling that Simmons cares far more about the feelings of religious bigots than their victims.

He’s not alone, though. Mike Lawson, another board member, shared Simmons’ earlier posting with his own garbage take about how he, too, was offended:

Thank you Mr. Simmons for your message and helpful information regarding the special meeting. I am also one who is personally offended by this. For those who are just becoming aware of issue at hand, it is not in regard to limiting free expression or speech, but is one of whether or not we will allow the desecration of religious texts under the umbrella of “art.”

By allowing torn pages from the Holy Bible to be the canvass of a clearly anti-Christian message, we are opening the door to all religious texts for all religious faiths to be subject to being treated the same way. Imagine if these were torn pages from a Koran (Islam), Talmud (Jewish), or religous texts of any other faith. There are moral and ethical boundaries established all through society. This impacts all people of all faiths.

It. Is. Art. It’s about symbolism and message and evoking emotions.

If you’re more offended by the torn pages of the Bible than the harmful, hateful message that’s literally written in red across the canvas, then you missed the entire point. Even by Lawson’s own made-up standards, those pages weren’t torn for the purpose of offending Christians; they were pages used to show how the supposed biblical message of God’s love can be twisted by the followers of that very book.

Maybe all of this is moot. The art show only lasted for one day, Sunday, and everything was down by the time students returned on Monday. But the board doesn’t seem to be done with this story yet since they’re still working on crafting a policy to address whatever they imagine is happening.

The next school board meeting is June 6. It would be nice if community members showed up to call out this absolute waste of time and energy because a student did exactly what she was supposed to do for her art project: She got people to think.

In an interview with Patrick Hite of the Staunton News Leader, Driscoll said she wanted her work to capture people’s attention:

"The whole thing is about showing light through the darkness of trauma," Driscoll told The News Leader Sunday. "That piece in particular was about religious trauma and trauma faced from not being accepted in a quote-unquote loving community. I wanted to really portray that. I know the message is a little strong and in your face, but the kind of shock factor is what I wanted to get out of it."

…

"In this county, it's very hard," Driscoll said. "There's a lot of discrimination and backlash. A lot of non-accepting people. But within the LGBTQ community itself, the people I have found have been very strong and very good for me. The community I have found has been really supportive and trusting."

Her interview answered the question about how this caught the school board’s attention in the first place. It was only when she set up the art show on Friday that someone walking through the school must have shared it online, leading to the board members’ outbursts.

Another takeaway from the article is that, while the school board members may not be able to handle this, Abby herself is surrounded by affirmation, including her art teacher, her principal, and her own mother:

"She's always been fairly independent," Dawn Driscoll said. "She can stand up for herself and speak for herself. She mentioned it this morning that there was the art show today. Then she told me what was going on."

Dawn was surprised that no one from the school board ever reached out to the family or, specifically, to Abby, to let her speak to the piece before going into a meeting to discuss it.

"I guess a lot of blowback or backlash against the piece kind of proves the (art's) message," Dawn Driscoll said.

She’s absolutely right. Abby should be proud of what she created and the “offended” school board members should be ashamed that she’s showing far more maturity than they ever could.

Incidentally, I appreciate this other piece of art she created on the topic of religion.