A Kansas teenager embarrassed an entire governor's office simply by sticking to her guns on Twitter.
Doing a routine search of the governor's name on social-networking sites, Brownback's communications director, Sherienne Jones-Sontag, found Sullivan's tweets and reached out to her school to demand an apology. Sullivan's principal acquiesced, and ordered Sullivan to draft an apology to send to the governor.
Initially Sullivan agreed, saying, "I didn't want to deal with it because I'm in the process of applying to school and am trying to keep my reputation good." But after a chat with her sister, a political science major at Wichita State University, Sullivan decided to tell her principal and Brownback that the deal was off. "I wasn't sorry for what I said because I meant it," she told Yahoo! News, saying that she disagrees with the Republican governor's views on gay rights and abortion.
Today, after digging in her heels against the most powerful man in her state for a week, Sullivan is getting an apology of her own. Brownback himself has backed down and says it's his staff, not Sullivan, who was in the wrong. "My staff overreacted to this tweet, and for that I apologize," Brownback said in a statement to The Associated Press. "Freedom of speech is among our most treasured freedoms."
Fact: All the best civics lessons are learned outside the classroom.
Photo via Sullivan's Twitter page