Three flags, one community
We are parents, Old Diocesans, staff and friends of Bishops who love this school and want it to remain a place where every boy knows, beyond doubt, that he belongs.
We ask Council to settle the flying of flags at Bishops openly and for the long term, through a clear written policy. Our position is that the School should fly only its three official flags in any official capacity: the national flag of South Africa, the Bishops flag, and the St George's flag. These three belong to all of us. They carry no faction and ask no member of the community to take a side.
One door, opened in perpetuity. The many other flags in the world, however worthy the causes behind them, do the opposite: each invites the School to align itself in a contested matter, and each presence or absence is then read as a statement. A school that opens that door does not open it once. It commits itself to deciding, year after year, which causes are flown and which are not, and to defending every one of those choices to a community that will never wholly agree.
A governance matter for Council. The Diocesan College Council, Rondebosch, Incorporation Act, 1891 vests the general direction and management of the College's affairs in the Council, a power it exercises subject to the trust deed. The role reserved to the Bishop of Cape Town concerns the religious teaching of the school; it does not extend to community relations or to symbolic and public-policy questions of this kind. The determination is Council's to make, and we ask that Council make it.
Said directly, not flown. We hold every gay and lesbian member of the Bishops community in exactly the regard we hold every other, and we want them to know, without ambiguity, that they belong here as fully as any Old Diocesan ever has. Our concern is not with them, and not with their inclusion, which we support without reservation. It is with the instrument. The message these boys are owed — you are welcome, you are safe, you are ours — is owed to them directly, in the School's own voice and by its own conduct, and it is stronger said that way than flown on a pole.
Should Council nonetheless decide that Bishops will fly flags beyond the three official ones, we ask only that the full written policy be published to the community, that it state plainly the principle by which the School decides what is flown and what is not, and that it apply that principle evenly. A policy that can be stated simply and applied consistently can be defended. One that cannot will be argued out, flag by flag, for years.
If that is your hope too, add your name.