What started as a viral e-mail among The Kinkaid School's students, parents, and alums has thrust the elite academy into the center of a heated coast-to-coast debate on the blogsophere.

It all started when the proverbial "football-players-dress-up-as-cheerleaders-and-make-asses-of-themselves" skit at the pep rally was pulled at the last minute due to concerns about "negative gender stereotyping."

This was the final straw for Hugh "Skip" McGee III, head of investment banking for Barclay's (with a rumored $25 million a year salary), who sent a scathing five-page missive to the Kinkaid board of directors. Pop culture and media über-blog Gawker describes it as "bullet-pointed explanation of the new white man's burden: Getting subversives fired from your kid's prep school. His rationale includes 'the parent whisper circuit,' 'a gay female coach,' and the time a 'leftist' teacher made his son cry."

Those who love bloated trainwrecks can view the email online, but we prefer the Kinkaid student-penned spoof that is making the rounds and is sure to be posted somewhere on the Internet soon.

The fallout, according to Kinkaid insiders and Gawker? The aforementioned teacher has been fired, the future is grim for the offending principal, and all diversity events planned are on hold. Several activities relating to The Laramie Project (a play about the murder of Matthew Shepard) have been shelved and a school-wide reading of Dr. Seuss' The Lorax has been cancelled.

Reaction? Meet overreaction.

We are perfectly happy to let Kinkaid sort out their diversity issues on their own (our sources say it's far more of a gray, complex issue than Gawker makes it out to be), but this combination of money, power, and a culture war in a Houston prep school was a surefire recipe to go viral.

It's interesting to note that it's the second Houston high school scandal to make national news this fall, after Memorial High School students made a totally gross and misogynist shirt to represent their rivalry with Stratford and were called out by fellow students and the blogosphere.

It looks like the culture war isn't just red state/blue state anymore. While it does lend a bit of scandal and notoriety to our city, at least we have people on both sides of the issues having discussions, however, ahem, interesting, some of those opinions might be.

We're just glad the politics of high school are behind us.