[imagesource: Lake Highlands High School SE]

Thank the powers that be that the generations-old sentiment of children needing to stay quiet and polite has been thrown far out of our cultural and social window.

Now more than ever, it’s obvious that high school students all over are more attuned to what society wants than some of (too many of, actually) our elected leaders.

Greta Thunberg is one such impressive young lady, speaking out about the climate crisis, and now Paxton Smith, a graduating senior from Lake Highlands High School in Dallas, Texas, is joining the ranks of young changemakers.

She took a brave step up to the podium to give what everyone expected to be her pre-approved commencement speech on teen media use, but she ditched that to use her platform to decry the ‘heartbeat bill’ instead.

The restrictive reproductive rights bill was recently signed by Texas Governo Greg Abbott and aims to ban abortion in the state at six weeks, a cut-off date at which Smith noted that some people still don’t know they’re pregnant, reports Mashable.

“In light of recent events, it feels wrong to talk about anything but what is currently affecting me and millions of other women in this state,” Smith said.

Her voice is overflowing with emotion but she powers through and gets a few cheers from the audience, especially after she says this:

“I have dreams, and hopes, and ambitions. Every girl graduating today does,” she said.

“And we have spent our entire lives working towards our future, and without our input, and without our consent, our control over that future has been stripped away from us.”

“I am terrified that if my contraceptives fail, I’m terrified that if I’m raped, then my hopes and efforts and dreams and efforts for my future will no longer matter.

I hope you can feel how gut-wrenching that is, I hope you can feel how dehumanising it is, to have the autonomy over your own body taken from away you.”

Her call to action is that people shouldn’t stay silent.

Watch her full speech, which starts from the 4:30 mark:

The red graduation garb and the control over women’s rights makes this situation look like something straight out of The Handmaid’s Tale.

While her message is being taken seriously beyond the Dallas community, school administrators have apparently threatened to withhold her diploma:

“What the student did was unexpected and not supported by LHHS or RISD,” RISD School Board President Karen Clardy told Advocate Magazine of Lake Highlands, a suburb northeast of Dallas where Smith went to school.

“We are going to review student speech protocols in advance of next year’s graduations to prevent something like this from happening again.”

It’s very, very applicable that her name is Karen.

[source:mashable]