Having An Opinion Is Now "Bullying"
As I've said before, if I were any more gay-friendly, I'd have a girlfriend instead of a boyfriend, but what I am not friendly to in the slightest are incursions against free speech. Hans Bader writes at OpenMarket.org about a dangerous precedent...the "ever-expanding concept of 'bullying'" is casting "an ominous shadow over free speech":A school superintendant has labeled a column in a school newspaper that criticized homosexuality as "bullying." (The Shawano High School newspaper decided to run dueling student opinion pieces on whether same-sex couples should be able to adopt children; the student article that was labeled as "bullying" answered the question "no." The school district also publicly apologized for the column, and said that it is "taking steps to prevent items of this nature from happening in the future.")...Schools and anti-bullying activists have adopted incredibly overbroad definitions of bullying. The anti-bullying website NoBully.com, and schools like Fox Hill and Alvarado Elementary, define even "eye rolling" and other expressions of displeasure or hostility as bullying, even though doing so raises First Amendment problems.
The Obama administration claims bullying is an "epidemic" and a "pandemic." But in reality, bullying and violence have steadily gone down in the nation's schools, as studies funded by the Justice Department have shown. The Obama administration's StopBullying.gov website defines a vast array of speech and conduct as bullying: it classifies "teasing" as a form of "bullying," and "rude" or "hurtful" "text messages" as "cyberbullying." Since "creating web sites" that "make fun of others" also is deemed "cyberbullying," conservative websites that poke fun at the president are presumably guilty of cyberbullying under this strange definition.
Look, I was bullied. Girls followed me through the halls in junior high and taunted me with anti-Semitic epithets. When it started to get serious (when they started throwing chairs in my path), I told my dad, and he went to the principal and it stopped.
The point is, there are measures that can be taken before we start crumpling up the Constitution. And sorry, but you don't have a right to not be offended, not even if you're in high school. What you should learn to do is think and write and debate well so you can see that your point of view wins the day. And if somebody throws a chair at you, and there's nobody to go to the principal's office for you...maybe that's the real problem we should be dealing with, but...
No...not legislatively, but by stigmatizing divorce and single-parent homes (that aren't created by the untimely death of one of the partners).
P.S. Children of gay parents fare no worse on mental health and other life-success measures than kids of straight parents...that is, when they're in intact families. In other words, intact families are what seems to matter.
Notice that the School Board is illiterate. No, really. They say that they are taking steps "to prevent items of this nature from happening in the future." Do newspaper items "happen" or are they written by humans? If they were honest, they would say, "We are taking steps to prevent further publication of an idea we find abhorrent."
Of course, we don't have all the evidence. Maybe the student article WAS bullying in its language and tone. We would need to see the article in order to judge for ourselves.
Still, bullying by school officials is on the rise and should be eradicated. Send those board members to a training, I say.