Fifteen-year-old Kayla Kenney suddenly finds herself kicked out of her high school, and her family says it’s because she posed for a photo with a rainbow birthday cake.

Kimberly Alford, Kayla’s mom, told the Louisville Courier-Journal that Whitefield Academy, a private pre-K-12 Christian school in Louisville, Kentucky, emailed her last week to say her daughter was being expelled immediately “due to a post on social media.”

On Dec. 30, Alford posted a photo on Facebook of Kayla next to a birthday cake with rainbow frosting. Kayla is wearing a rainbow sweater and grinning for the camera.

Alford told the Washington Post that a screenshot of her Facebook post was included as an attachment to the expulsion email from Whitefield’s head of school, which read: “The WA Administration has been made aware of a recent picture, posted on social media, which demonstrates a posture of morality and cultural acceptance contrary to that of Whitefield Academy’s beliefs. We made it clear that any further promotion, celebration or any other action and attitudes counter to Whitefield’s philosophy will not be tolerated.”

Alford said the cake/sweater combo wasn’t even an expression of her daughter’s sexuality or allyship.

“Rainbows don’t mean you’re a certain gender or certain sex or sexuality,” Alford told The Washington Post. “I’m not saying she’s this or that — she’s just Kayla to me. … I ordered the cake, she didn’t.”

She said she even showed the school a receipt from the bakery, which asks for a cake decorated with “assorted colors.”

Whitefield Academy released a statement saying the expulsion was the result of a series of violations.

“In fact, she has unfortunately violated our student code of conduct numerous times over the past two years,” the school said in the statement. “In the fall, we met with the student to give her a final chance to begin to adhere to our code of conduct. Unfortunately, she did not live up to the agreement, and therefore, has been expelled.”

Under “general discipline policies” in Whitefield Academy’s parent/student handbook, the school spells out its role to “work in conjunction with the home to mold students to be Christ-like. On occasion, the atmosphere or conduct within a particular home may be counter or in opposition to the Biblical lifestyle the school teaches. This includes, but is not limited to, sexual immorality, homosexual orientation or the inability to support Biblical standards of right and wrong.”

Maybe that’s enough cover to consider a rainbow cake the final straw. It strikes me as a petty, injurious overreaction, but I’m not running the place.

I do think it’s worth pausing though, before we shrug and move on to the next news story, to consider what message this sort of event sends to kids who are figuring out who they are and who they love and where they will fit into this world.

I do think it’s worth pausing and saying, loud and clear: Your faith and your sexuality don’t have to be at odds. If you identify as a Christian and you identify as gay, you don’t have to cleave off one part of yourself to remain true to the other.

No one explains this better than John Pavlovitz, a North Carolina-based minister and author whose work I’ve long admired. I called him Wednesday to get his thoughts about the cake story.

“It’s ironic that someone would see the rainbow, which in the story of Noah was a symbol of God’s expansive love, and have that symbol become something they would weaponize,” Pavlovitz said. “It just shows our complete lack of understanding of the heart of Jesus and what his teachings and what his life were trying to create in the world.”

He knows some people will cheer the school’s decision. He knows those cheers will land on the ears and in the hearts of young people in the LGBTQ community.

“A move like that gets cheap applause from others who want that same kind of vengeful religion,” he said. “It’s the sort of easy win that people get when they exclude people, when they can try to claim some sort of moral high ground. It’s intoxicating. It makes people feel more spiritual.”

“It’s short-hand religion without a deeper theology,” he said. “If you don’t have a theology of empathy, there is no Jesus there. Even if you look at someone who is gay and you believe that’s not what God wants for people, Jesus encountered people throughout his ministry that would be doing things God wouldn’t want for them. And he always leaves them with more dignity than he found them.”

To be clear, Pavlovitz doesn’t believe being gay is a sin. He believes in and preaches radical inclusivity and believes Jesus did the same.

“Part of the work I try to do is have people develop a deeper empathy and a stronger, compassionate heart for others,” he said. “That’s how you emulate Jesus. But you see something like this happen in a school and you know they’re not seeing this young person as a fully formed human being. They’re seeing her as an issue. It just reminds you how much work there is to do in rediscovering the real message of Jesus.”

Sometimes it arrives in the form of a rainbow cake.

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