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State of dysfunction: at Boys State, students learn firsthand how democracy really works. Lessons in intolerance and gay bashing are thrown in free.

Article Excerpt
I know from experience that when a teenager's sheltered world collides with reality, reality in a walk. I was thinking of this basis truth this August as I talked with three 17-year-old honor students from Austin's McCallum High School. The worlds of Dashiell Oatman-Stanford, Sam Bass, and John Minnich had crashed two months earlier, and they were still dealing with the trauma.

They were among the approximately nine hundred Texas high-school-senior-to-be selected to attend American Legion's prestigious Boys State program, held in Austin each June since 1940. The event brings together the brightest, men in the state and throws them into an unrelenting seven-day sausage grinder of politics and participatory democracy. It's a brave attempt to teach how government really works: "Learn by doing" is the Boys State motto. The boys run the entire show--electing officers, creating party platforms, debating legislation, and generally behaving like teenagers everywhere--while the adult members of the Legion stand aside like props in a loony bin.

Those who make it through remember it as an arduous but instructive adventure. Some go on to become our state's leaders: Several members of the current Legislature are Boys State alumni. But the McCallum boys had a different experience. As they describe it, they discovered "an atmosphere of hatred and intolerance" and decided to withdraw after only three days. For them, it was a trip to hell.

Selected last winter by their junior class counselor, the McCallum three were less than enthusiastic about the Boys State opportunity. Former McCallum students who had attended the program had told them that it reflects the conservative values of the American Legion; it's militaristic, superpatriotic, and heavily tilted to God and country, sometimes at the cost of good government. But the boys believed that a stint at Boys State would offer them valuable insights into politics and might help them gain admission to a top college. Dashiell's...

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