The White House is calling for coordinated anti-bullying efforts.
This shows up in my in-box just as I was about to call for some coordinated presidential bullying of Moammar Gaddafi. But I digress.
The White House held a conference on bullying last week with the President and First Lady “calling on parents, teachers, students, and communities to address the problem together.”
Members of Congress also this week introduced several LGBT-inclusive bills designed to address bullying and harassment of students.
In his opening remarks, President Obama said the one overarching goal of the conference was “to dispel the myth that bullying is just a harmless rite of passage or an inevitable part of growing up.” Instead, he said, “Bullying can have destructive consequences for our young people.”
The President also noted that bullying is “more likely to affect kids that are seen as different, whether it’s because of the color of their skin, the clothes they wear, the disability they may have, or sexual orientation.”
Attending the event were senior administration officials and approximately 150 students, parents, teachers, advocates, and others, including representatives from the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the National Center for Transgender Equality, and the Trevor Project.
Okay, bullying is wrong. But this isn’t entirely about bullying, is it?
This is partly about promoting acceptance of alternative lifestyles. Most of us today are pretty accepting of these lifestyles, and all decent people know that it would be wrong to be unkind to anybody because of sexual orientation. Decent people don’t bully. But a kid who is a Christian is more likely to face censure in some schools. Why aren’t Christian kids on the president’s no-bullying list?
Schools must discipline kids for bullying-actually, I’m not sure they can. Schools have limited ability to discipline anybody today. So here’s an idea for Charlotte’s No Bullying Campaign: Make it easier for schools to suspend and then, if suspension doesn’t work, expel unruly kids. Now, there’s a no bullying effort!
My problems with the no bullying campaign are twofold: it is ideologically driven, second, this really isn’t what government should do. This is an issue for a family. Families teach children to behave decently-or they don’t. Stable families instill civility, but ideological anti-bullying campaigns instill ideology.