You’ll excuse me if my feelings are kind of mixed on the ten year old “Conflict of Conscience” kid from Arkansas.

A 10-year-old Arkansas boy name Will Phillips has decided that he cannot in good conscience pledge allegiance to the flag as long as the country for which it stands refuses legal equality to its GLBT citizens.

That stand has brought young Mr. Phillips anti-gay taunts in the lunch room, but admiration from around the country, reports a Nov. 5 Arkansas Times article. The West Fork School District fifth grader clashed with a substitute teacher for his refusal to stand for the pledge, prompting a call to Will’s mother, Laura Phillips. When the principal acknowledged that Will has the right to refuse to say the pledge, Ms. Phillips asked that her son receive an apology–a request that the principal declined to honor.

Obviously the school administrators are in the wrong, the substitute teacher, and “Kids can be so cruel”.

The thing I can’t help but get around with the kid is that he’s moving in one of two directions here.  His favoring of uncompromising politics will either serve him to forever change the World, or it will prove a fool-hardy venture that will grind him up into a pulp as he faces the limits of Pure and Lonely stances, if you insist on stopping this or that procedure until the country lives up to an ideal you will be waiting an awfully long time.

Fairness in this case is more than a mere abstraction, since the family has a number of openly gay friends and has participated in GLBT equality events such as Pride parades. Will, who told the newspaper that he would like to pursue a career in law when he’s older, could not square the tenets of the pledge with the political realities faced by his family’s GLBT friends, whose family and individual rights are under constant challenge. “I really don’t feel that there’s currently liberty and justice for all,” said Will.

It would almost be better if somehow this were not the case, if he came to this stance with no particular sign-posts from family and parents, his impressions come more directly from elsewhere.  But we don’t live in a vacuum.   Still, you have to prefer him over the danged CPAC speaker, and I’d prefer the child’s activism of this issue-oriented basis over the “Kids for Kerry” speaker at the 2004 DNC Convention.

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