*Disclaimer: Humor articles may be works of fiction. Quotes should be considered libel and slander.*

Won Yung doesn’t look like your average civil rights crusader. A mere five feet tall, the senior stands literally in the shadow of Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman, whose crusade he is continuing to fight. Despite being a member of Stuyvesant High School’s 2200-student strong Asian majority, Yung has come into personal contact with a gross and discriminatory injustice that shakes his beliefs in America’s egalitarian ideals to the core. A lover of Anime and Japanese culture, Yung has been in a four year committed romantic relationship with Sakura, a 2-D depiction of a prepubescent girl on the cover of his body pillow.

Hoping to take his sweetheart to this month’s Senior Prom, Yung attempted to purchase a ticket for the pillow from Senior Activities Coordinator James Lonardo. As the transaction was being conducted, however, a passing comment about the ticket’s intended recipient caused Principal Stanley Teitel to officially ban the pillow from attending.
“There are certain boundaries that should never be crossed,” Teitel said. “There’s a time and place for this sort of behavior. And that’s never. And nowhere.”

Yung responded to the banning by weeping softly while clutching Sakura. After calming the pillow, Yung proceeded to file a federal anti-discrimination lawsuit with the assistance of the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU).
“I was inspired by that courageous lesbian girl from the south,” Yung said, in a reference to Mississippi teenager Constance McMillan, who obtained an order from a judge compelling her school district to allow her to attend prom with a same-sex date. “This is better because it’s not a sin,” Yung said.

Yung’s lead counsel, NYCLU Associated Legal Director Christopher Dunn, is cautiously optimistic about his client’s chances. “The courts haven’t directly addressed the circumstances surrounding man-on-life-sized-anime-pillow-case relationships, but Supreme Court precedents such as Loving v. Virginia give us a fighting chance on First and Fourteenth Amendment grounds,” Dunn said. “I’ll do everything in my power to make sure Won can go to prom, assuming Sakura hasn’t been too traumatized by this whole ordeal.”

While he has an intensely personal stake in the outcome, Yung insists that he is fighting for the rights of “every student who reads his or her comic books from right to left. I’m the president of Stuyvesant’s [anime-appreciating] Neo-gokuraku club. When elected, I swore I’d stand up for equal rights for all, whether they be flesh and blood, ink and paper, or cotton and down,” Yung said. “The school’s prom policy is simply a violation of my human rights and Sakura’s pillow rights.”