Posted under Culture & Education
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg educational gulag has now banned “bullying.†Schoolkids will now treat each other with compassion, equality, and respect.
I can’t believe I just typed that.Â
Here’s the latest victory for progressive education:
Dozens of students urged the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board to pass a new policy Tuesday to protect them from bullies.
Christian conservatives urged the board not to, voicing concerns that the policy will promote homosexuality.
But after more than two hours of impassioned arguments from more than 40 speakers, the board approved the policy on a 6-3 vote. Kaye McGarry, Ken Gjertsen and Larry Gavreau opposed it.
McGarry, Gjestsen, and Gavreau are the minority conservatives on the school board, and are consistently outvoted. So what about the moderates? They’re doing what moderates in government do—using the language of conservatism to implement the leftist agenda:
Board member Molly Griffin conditioned her support for the policy on making sure the youngest children will receive age-appropriate instruction.
In other words, we’re going to make sure the kids are at least 14 before they’re taught that homosexuality is the coolest way to be. Wasn’t it nice of the progressives to toss us that bone? I’m thankful—thankful my daughter’s out of this cesspool.
Now you may ask—why not simply punish any kid who abuses any other kid for any reason? Why specifically list homosexuality as a protected class? The issue was indeed raised:
Earlier, McGarry proposed an anti-bullying policy that didn’t include specific protections for sexual orientation and gender identity. That policy failed on a 6-3 vote, with Gjertsen and Gavreau joining her in the minority.
“This policy is not about education, it’s about indoctrination,†McGarry said.
As you can expect, the liberal Charlotte Observer joined in the howls of protest against this obection. Why, they assured us, this policy will protect ALL of our children. It has nothing to do with promoting homosexuality.
Sure. And why do you think many parents and the conservatives on the board got the idea this new policy is about promoting homosexuality? Maybe from this lady:
“If you talk to students who are bullied, they will tell you that they’re not protected and they don’t know where to go,†said Kelley Doherty, a CMS parent and Wachovia executive who chairs the district’s Equity Committee. “If you are singled out, it is merciless.â€
It seems the school district’s chair of the Equity Committee has issues with Charlotte’s traditional culture—and she aims to do something about it, as reported in Forbes a few years ago:
Kelley Doherty, 38, executive with Bank of America and president of the Charlotte Business Guild, a gay and lesbian networking organization.
“The worst thing—let me put on my gay hat—is that it is still suffering from the Bible belt mentality.â€
That “gay hat†must be working for her, because the local homosexual advocacy magazine also sees the “anti-bullying†policy as a coup for the cause of importing the homosexual agenda into the Bible Belt:
Members of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education formally introduced an LGBT-inclusive anti-bullying policy at their Feb. 12 meeting, despite outcries and resistance from anti-gay colleagues and community members.
These and other obvious ties to the homosexual lobby have driven some parents to form what they call the CMS Policy Watch. Here’s their web site.
Not only does the homosexual agenda receive government endorsement through this policy, but another, even more destructive agenda is being promoted here. That’s the idea that government is the answer to all unpleasantness and discomfort. First of all, government cannot and should not be used for such a purpose. Face it—kids are mean. They bully other kids. And learning to deal with bullies is just part of growing up.Â
Furthermore, the “anti-bullying†policy is just another false promise of government that it can protect you from everything. That’s the real message here. This policy encourages statism, the notion that the more powerful government is, the more good it can do. But any real understanding of history—or just a glance at the daily news—will tell you that government power is something to be used sparingly, cautiously, or it will spill out of its boundaries and cause untold destruction. Like a brushfire, only more sinister.
But maybe I’ve located a silver lining in this lavender cloud in the actual wording of the anti-bullying policy:
It is the policy of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education to maintain learning environments that are free from harassment or bullying. This freedom includes …freedom from harassment or bullying based on an individual’s real or perceived race, color, sex, religion, creed, political belief, age, national origin, linguistic or language differences, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, socioeconomic status, height, weight, physical characteristics, marital status, parental status, or physical, mental, or sensory disability. …
So maybe the next time Yankee kids make fun of Southern accents or symbols in school, we could use this against them. Wouldn’t that be ironic?
Andrew T. on 13 Mar 2008 at 12:50 am #
Harrison, with all due respect, I think you’re reading too much sinister intent into all this. It’s not like this policy is promoting any particular lifestyle; this policy is one against student bullying in general, and that’s perfectly good for me. I’m not sure why it isn’t good for you.
I also don’t see how it encourages statism. This is being decided by a school board, right? Sure, it’s a public school, but if you were really trying to criticize statism, you’d be reporting more policing abuses and overzealous taserings than you knew what to do with.
roho on 13 Mar 2008 at 2:33 am #
Bullying crosses all boundries and is often the “older” student harrasing the younger student. That being said, let me abandon all PC discourse, and simply state that in many school systems the 16 year old black student is bullying his 12 year old counterpart in the 7th grade before dropping out!
Weaver on 13 Mar 2008 at 4:43 am #
There’s something to be said for letting a child learn to stand on his own and for some sort of entry test into a higher group / adulthood.
Rather than these children shooting each other in mass murder, I think it’d be nice if they challenged their tormentors to a fight or perhaps even a nonviolent competition.
But yea at the same time the ones who seek out the weak ought to be punished: the proper punishment is probably humiliation (wearing a nice tutu all day at school) or a good spanking though, neither of which is legal I think.
Moral education would help, tell them there’s more to life than the meaningless pursuit of pleasure. Though of course, ethics and religion aren’t allowed it seems… Wouldn’t want to impose our views, lest the Marxist views lose some of their appeal..
Weaver on 13 Mar 2008 at 4:58 am #
This will just be used to indoctrinate though yea. All the paranoia of the media PC will just be pushed further into the schools.
And I wouldn’t be surprised to learn the homoerotics lose out the most under such policies: becoming freaks who flaunt their disorder and come to hate both themselves and the society that rejects them. Though I dunno much about how to handle such things. All I know is communities ought to take care of their own, and the nerdy kids who study hard often become the future leaders it seems.
Andrew T. on 13 Mar 2008 at 5:02 am #
Yeah, I’m not too familiar with all of the medical research that either confirms or discredits the idea that homosexuality is a product of nature as opposed to nurture, so I don’t think I’m entirely qualified to say something about that. But I’m pretty sure that children attacking other children is a bad thing.
Weaver on 13 Mar 2008 at 5:05 am #
I edited my post lol – trying to cut down my rants
HarrisonBergeron on 13 Mar 2008 at 1:52 pm #
Yeah. The homosexual lobby and its media pushed this because of their sense of civic duty. Got it.
Filmer on 13 Mar 2008 at 3:10 pm #
Exclusive homosexuality (as opposed to opportunistic homosexuality) may have a biological component. Who hasn’t known a little boy who was different and “you just knew?” It is almost certainly not “genetic” per se. If you do the math, it takes very few generations before that mutation will disappear because it obviously does not confer reproductive fitness. It could have something to do with some sort of biological insult in the womb.
That said, the Biblical admonition against homosexuality still stands. We know that alcoholism is strongly inherited, yet the Bible still says don’t get drunk. People who are “born” with an inclination towards homosexuality are still obligated to abide by the Biblical commands against it. We all have our “cross to bear.” Nowhere in the Bible does it say everyone struggles equally with the same crosses. Smart people may struggle with pride. Good looking people may struggle with vanity. Some struggle more with food. Some have stronger sex drives. Etc.
To be generous, the Biblical admonition may well have been intended more as an admonition against opportunistic homosexuality. Thinking from the standpoint of societal stability it is easy to see why you do not want your horniest (for lack of better term) segment of society running around with the opportunity for unlimited fulfillment with no obligation. Societally speaking, women, marriage and fatherhood serve the roll of “taming” the young men. But that said, there is still no Biblical grounds to say homosexual conduct among exclusive homosexuals is OK. If these folks have always been with us, how did societies handle them in the past before it became more accepted and with a lobby demanding rights? They just never married, or married and did the best they could.
The modern thinks that is a bad solution because we have elevated personal fulfillment over the ways of God and the stability of the community as a whole.
Harold Crews on 13 Mar 2008 at 4:10 pm #
For curiousity’s sake has the definition of bullying changed? It has been more than twenty years since I graduated high school. But from what I recall teachers could pretty much stop bullying, even taunting then. It is not as if a teacher asked himself whether or not something qualified as bullying. Then if it did amount to bullying, let the bully continue because after all there wasn’t a policy against bullying.
Of course when the man/child or women/child enters the workforce, who will be his or her mama or daddy then. Just more pc bullcrap, instilling a sense of victimisation on children and a belief that the government is the one who will protect them. And no I wasn’t a bully in school.
love the girls on 13 Mar 2008 at 5:58 pm #
“bullying” is simply a pseudonym for the natural law written into the hearts of all men which a corrupt society is attempting to expunge from children.
Andrew T. on 13 Mar 2008 at 6:04 pm #
Nah. Bullying is one person intimidating and harming another. Which is really, really wrong.
love the girls on 13 Mar 2008 at 6:41 pm #
Mr. T writes “Bullying is one person intimidating and harming another.”
While that may be the proper understanding of the term, that is not how the term is being used in this context, as others have already pointed out.
Or as Mr. Bergeron so nicely put it: “The homosexual lobby and its media pushed this because of their sense of civic duty.”
roho on 13 Mar 2008 at 6:52 pm #
My favorite example of bullying is the wonderful “Christmas Story” movie that is played every year with Darrin McGavin as the head of household, and the son that has been told he can’t have a BB gun “because he will shoot his eye out”!…………Once the frustration of being bullied sets in, he handled the situation nicely.(And he got his daisey “Red Ridder” BB gun!)
And his Dad got his wonderfull lamp.
Weaver on 13 Mar 2008 at 6:56 pm #
Social pressures can be an effective force for regulating good behavior within a society yea. That’s how villagers supposedly used to keep each other in line.
If you see another steal, you show your disapproval, etc.
Man is a social creature, not an individual, and as such it’d probably be beneficial to see how other societies, esp Christian societies, handled homoeroticism… You want such people to be happy and to feel they belong, though at the same time you don’t want to undermine the community. I don’t think there’s anyway to regulate what goes on in their own homes though… Neighbors can shun them I guess, but such oughtn’t be any harsher than a straight man having intercourse out of wedlock. Perversion is perversion.
Some pagan and Muslim societies actually encouraged it as a means of population control and reduction of bastards.
Harold Crews on 13 Mar 2008 at 7:13 pm #
If we really want to look at this topic perhaps we need to define the words. It would be fair I think to limit bullying to coercion of others for solitary ends: lunch money, ego trip, etc. But is bullying rightly considered a means of enforcing broader social values? Should this be more rightly considered intimidation and not bullying? If this policy is a means of bluring lines between bullying, intimidation and non-violent means of enforcing social values (shunning, taunting, etc)? Further this policy puts school administrators and not the public as the decision maker on and enforcer of social values.
Andrew T. on 13 Mar 2008 at 7:17 pm #
“Man is a social creature, not an individual”
See today’s FPJ article about this subject, which also mentions Richard Weaver, who you admire:
http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/print.aspx?article=144&loc=b&type=cbbp
Tad B Johnson on 13 Mar 2008 at 9:59 pm #
The problem is that bullying is a unique form of messing with someone – it’s not just a specific threat or a specific punch, but the overall transformation of a climate to be completely hostile and perceived as dangerous. You can’t concentrate on learning if you’re worrying that you’re going to get the daylights beaten out of you for not doing the bigger kids homework or if you’re going without lunch becuase you got your money taken.
It’s the same reason we have organized crime laws. It’s not just Vito and Angelo beating a shopkeeper with a bat – it’s what it does to the environment.
More than that, in this age of litigious happy parents who blame the schools for everything and don’t raelise that they’ve raised a pathetic little puke, unless you have specific rules and standards that you can demonstrate have been violated, the parents of the bullly will sue and your kid will get even more terrorized.
Ask me sometime about what happened with my son and Korean gang at his shcool in NOVA. Jeez.
Weaver on 13 Mar 2008 at 11:53 pm #
Good article, yea Weaver was right on that issue.
Weaver on 14 Mar 2008 at 1:32 am #
East Asians tell me the Koreans are the toughest.
Litigation is destroying the country. A lot of this is common sense. I’m tempted to get into this more, but I suspect we all pretty much agree on it for the most part. And such social issues are going to vary a lot case by case.
Oh well, at least the federal government isn’t in on this… yet. Bush education reforms: Part I: No Child Left Behind / Part II: No Child a Social Outcast / Part III: ???
Tad B Johnson on 14 Mar 2008 at 2:34 pm #
Weaver,
I don’t think that you really made a dent in why it’s important to have bullying laws. They’re like RICO laws – they go after the people who pollute the community.
TBJ
love the girls on 15 Mar 2008 at 2:43 am #
“They’re like RICO laws – they go after the people who threaten (sic) the establishment (sic).”
HarrisonBergeron on 15 Mar 2008 at 5:40 pm #
Yes, it’s wrong for a child to assault another. But the measure implemented by the Char-Meck educrats is specifically aimed at protecting homosexuals.
Apple pie is a wonderful treat. You can talk about the antioxidant effects of Granny Smith apples and the warm memories you have of mom baking apple pies on crisp November evenings, but if the Radical Vegetarian Socialist Lesbian Alliance is having a bake sale, I’m not about to buy any from them.
In other words, we have to keep our eyes open to the purpose of a measure, and to who’s pushing it.
Bill R on 15 Mar 2008 at 6:04 pm #
Unh huh. Everybody here commenting ACCEPTED the statement that bullying of homos is a problem in schools. Like they are singled out.
By accepting the “given” presented you, you then argue about whether they need to be protected as a special class.
I don’t have much sympathy for them. Simply because the schools are promoting this “class” of people, allowing organizations promoting this sick lifestyle to be established on school grounds on school time, and have a day reserved entirely to this class of perverts on school grounds on school time.
Where’s the bullying?
Well, the bullying is occuring to Christians in the schools. They are made fun of by the kids, the bullying IS institutionalized by the school administration and teachers through ridiculing Christians in class, and Christians are prohibited from displaying ANY evidence of their Christian lives on apparel, on their desk, on their notebooks, etc. While homos are allowed to wear T shirts advertising themselves, and the School hangs up posters advocating for the sick lifestyle.
WHO needs protection from bullying again?
Weaver on 15 Mar 2008 at 7:10 pm #
Mr. Johnson,
Regulating Bullying
I don’t see why the law can’t say the school has the right to regulate this as it sees fit.
When teachers see bullying, they stop it of course. However, you can’t force children to like each other, and you can’t punish those who are more popular. Bullying must be stemmed, but you can’t mandate children to accept others and to befriend all – that is to say you can’t punish a child for his values and preferences though values ought to be taught. And I hold the same suspicion as the author of this post, that this would
—
Reverse discrimination
Bullying a straight child because of his freckles ought to be equally as bad as bullying a homoerotic child because of his sexuality. However, which do you think they’ll prefer? If we must have protected classes, then all classes ought to be protected equally. Currently traditional, straight, Southern, white, Christian males indubitably lose out…
Tolerating stereotypes about natives and condemning outcast stereotypes permeates our schools and punishes our children for not being outcasts within society. Outcasts are raised up on a pedestal while the founding core of this country are mocked for being natives. I’ve seen such incidents
I had some Yankee teachers who’d tell us over and over how vile and racist Southerners were too, though that created more fun than harm since we could more easily rebel against them… Thankfully, they weren’t telling children about homoeroticism when I was going through, or if they did I missed it.
Christian Tolerance
The concept of homoeroticism was mocked at my school, as it is at most every school without the imposing of a corrupted set of ethics. However, such a child should be accepted as having a disorder, just as would a child with any other – that is he’d have to struggle as an outcast, but he’d make some friends too and would be protected by the teachers from anything over the top. You can’t stop children from being children though, and children pick on the outcasts… The only way to make them stop entirely is to impose on them a rigid set of ethics mandating that homoeroticism and every other difference is normal, which would corrupt the Christian ethics that man is meant to like women and that the purpose of sex is an expression of love and the production of children.
It would be no more right to say homoerotic men are equal to heteroerotic men than to say a crippled boy is equal to a star athlete (with regard to their attributes.) Some attributes are superior or more normal than are others.
Adding to this outrage, these teachers will be teaching their students how homoeroticism is normal and acceptable. That is to say: they will be teaching a set of values that is not Christian. The real bullies here are the teachers and school board who will now likely be able to bully those with Christian ethics, who commit “hate thought.” And the greatest victims may well be the homoerotics who, rather than learning to accept their disorder as… a disorder, are taught they are normal and it is society that is disordered, thus they come to hate society and likely themselves since they deep down would prefer to join society. They’ll probably also learn to enjoy provoking reactions and using the authorities against peers. This is similar to how blacks are taught they’re equally as smart as whites, Jews, and Asians, and that all inequality is the result of society’s racism. Both the native core and the outcast minorities then all lose out rather than learning to accept their proper place within society by harmonising themselves with it.
My apologies, but I thought my position was clear on this – the above is what I’d assumed had been expressed. The only positive spin from this is that the federal government isn’t involved… yet.
—
The lesson learned from this might be that public schools are hopelessly lost. If we can’t teach that homoeroticism is unnatural and that perversion is a sin, then our children are being corrupted. A Christian society teaches these things, and a natural society, even without the directly revealed truth, seems to inherently know such things are unnatural.
Weaver on 15 Mar 2008 at 7:57 pm #
Harold Crews writes:
I’d say the chief function of a school is the teaching of the right set of ethics to the children. It’s also of course meant to pass on the community’s history and other knowledge, but this is secondary I’d say.
If the public schools can’t do this, then the children need to be removed and set to private schools that can.
Harold Crews on 17 Mar 2008 at 3:08 pm #
Weaver we have no disagreement on that.
Tad B Johnson on 17 Mar 2008 at 9:49 pm #
Weaver,
If I am to read your post correctly, you’re saying that because bullying standards and laws also protect homosexuals who are picked on *becuase* they’re homosexuals, you’d rather have no bullying laws at all, and then go on to say how stopping people from picking on homosexuals is a kind of reverse discrimination becuase the bullies are claiming a religious mandate for what they want to do.
Obviously, you’ve never been the only Catholic family in a predominantly Protestant area. Let me tell you this. The Korean gang at my son’s school picked on him incessantly because he was a white Catholic in a predominantly Korean Baptist area. It was constant humliliation – they would destroy his confirmation class materials, make him kiss the shoe of the ring leader and then claim they were punching him on behalf of all the little boys he wanted to sodomize. They would do it on and off school property – he had no way of knowing when it was going to come or not. There was no frequency to it. SOmetimes they would take his money and homework, sometimes they would beat him up for no stated reason. This was pure terrorism at its worst.
The teachers legally do nothing. My kid was so terrified that he would barely admit it too us, his flesh and blood, much less principels and teachers. They saw the consequneces of him being beaten and terroised but unless he complained and named names, they couldn’t legally do anything. And even if he did name names, without witnesses and other kids willing to corroboatre, all that would have happend was that my son would have been beaten even more for being a snitch.
You want to know how the deadlock was brokeN? He finally told our priest everything that had been happening, and he called over to Korean Baptist church to try and sort it out. Those ruffians had the nerve to claim that his papery was an affront to their religion, and that they were just fighitng back against the white Catholic oppressoin of Korean people. That was the first I heard about Koreansbeing oppressed by white Catholics. Last I checked, we were still garding the damn DMZ.
We had to go outside the damn school system because the rules and laws at the school are insuffienct to cover this kind of terrorism. We ultimately had to pull my son out of school and send him to St. Thomas More, where he could be safe.
The lesson to elarn is this – being in the minority sucks. I walked away from that horrified to think of how many times I’d supported laws that allow this kind of terrorims to occur. Imagine being the one white kid in an all black school or a black kid in an all white school. Or look at what my son went through. Just claiming religion isn’t enough – it provides cover for what anyone who wants to be an asshole will do.
We’re all safer when schools do nothing more than enforce a generalized public morality and provide a safe environment in which kids of all kinds can learn and flourish. IF you think that you’re oppressed because you can’t bully people for being gays, wait till you find Mohammed and Khalid who will claim that their religious obligation to beat up your white children and reclaim the lands stolen in the crusades is infringed by anti-bullying laws.
TBJ
Weaver on 25 Mar 2008 at 1:22 pm #
The teachers should have been legally allowed to step in, certainly.
With diversity comes conflict, especially from more violent cultures (pretty much every nonWestern culture.)
I didn’t mean that homoerotics should be bullied but rather that they should be perceived as abnormal.
A little boy with zits covering his face is also abnormal though he doesn’t deserve the teasing and bullying he will get as a result of it. Boys will be boys, and immoral actions will be taken. And if you think boys are bad, you should see girls…
Life isn’t fair, but the goal is to make the best possible community. Utopia isn’t possible though.
—
What this law does is impose a new set of ethics: that homoerotics are normal and that while straight guys may be picked on homoerotics may not. The result is the normal is treated as abnormal. It is natural for homoerotics to be teased a little.
I tend to emphasise the importance of community. And one of the benefits of community is the sense of belonging it provides and the protection of the weak. Homoerotics and others with disorders should be loved, accepted, cared for, and given a sense of belonging.