School Stops Boy’s Gay Marriage Speech

School Stops Boy’s Gay Marriage Speech, Fifth-grader Kameron Slade’s pitch to legalize it was slated for a schoolwide assembly. Never mind the halls of Congress or even the White House.The case for legalizing gay marriage is being made in New York, but not in the mayor’s office or even the state’s capital. It’s coming from Kameron Slade, a fifth-grade student at PS 195 in New York City.

When the bespectacled student was tasked with giving a speech in front of his entire school, he went big, choosing to take on the controversial topic of same-sex marriage.

“It just happened that we were watching the news one day and the president was on mentioning that he supported gay marriage,” Kameron’s mom, who asked that her first name not be used, told ABC News.com today.

“He said, ‘I want to do something very different. I don’t want to do the same thing that everybody does,’” she said. “I asked him how he knew about it [gay marriage] and what he felt.

“He said, ‘Mom, I don’t want to say the word sex.’ So he changed it to say gender marriage,” she said. “So I said, ‘Write about it, write it all out and that’s what he did.”

Kameron was supposed to deliver the speech during a contest Friday but the school’s principal, Beryl Bailey, intervened, fearing the speech would be inappropriate for fellow students.

“She said that people have different opinions on it and that some parents may not want their children to learn about this type of topic,” Kameron told NY1, which first reported the principal’s decision. “I was really looking forward to it. I thought that this was a real good winning speech.”

Text of Kameron’s prepared speech, ironically, seemed to predict the principal’s decision.