According to Christian groups like Focus on the Family and Concerned Women for America, anti-bullying legislation is actually a secret way to push the homosexual agenda onto America’s children.
First and foremost, I must have missed the memo on what exact “agenda” some worldwide federation of homosexuals produced and handed out. I would kindly ask anyone with a copy of this agenda to forward it to me at the e-mail address provided.
Secondly, lawmakers are actually listening to the Christian conservative groups that have been lobbying them. I don’t know if these groups have a lot of money, or if the lawmakers believe that their constituents agree with these groups, but it is certain that not enough people are speaking out against them.
This “anti-anti-bullying campaign” by the religious right, as the Guardian’s Katherine Stewart put it in an article published April 3, has been going on for years. In 2010, a California school adopted an anti-bullying rule that mentioned gays and lesbians. An “education analyst” for the ultra-conservative group Focus on the Family told ABC News that the school had “introduced anti-bullying lessons, but really they’re teaching elementary school kids about gay marriage.”
Oh, really? Had this “analyst” actually sat in on classes where the teachers were telling everyone to marry a member of the same sex, or were the children just being informed that gay people exist and should be treated like human beings? (Tennessee is currently trying to pass a “don’t say gay” bill that would restrict teaching about homosexuality until high school.)
Last month, a Christian lobbying group convinced Arizona lawmakers to drop an anti-bullying bill that it claimed carried a “gay-friendly agenda,” according to the Arizona Daily Star (there’s that agenda word again. Where is this agenda?).
Michigan passed a bill in 2011 that actually allowed bullying if it was based on “a sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction.” In short, what that bill tells parents of children like 14-year-old Matt Epling, who killed himself in 2002 after bullies assaulted him, is this: “We’re sorry that bullies drove your son to suicide, but his bullies really believed what they were saying was true, so it’s okay in our book.” The proponents of the bill even tried to name it after Matt, which seems unusually cruel.
Now, some religious groups are claiming that anti-bullying legislation violates their religious freedom, says Katy Hall in an article published on the Huffington Post website. Never mind that bullying prevents kids’ freedom of expression, freedom to be themselves; heck, even Jesus said that people were free to cast stones. Those who did so just had to be free of sin.
Some lawmakers who struck down a Kentucky anti-bullying bill similar to the one in Arizona were quoted in the Lexington Herald-Leader as claiming that more such bills were unnecessary in the light of existing anti-bullying legislation. Kentucky Rep. Addia Wuchner called the bill “just more verbiage.” Rep. C.B. Embry Jr. said that such legislation was useless because “we have a death penalty against rape and murder but they still happen.” (Might as well legalize rape and murder, then.)
The fact is that laws cause action. The father of a girl who killed herself told the Herald-Leader, “Teachers have often turned a blind eye to bullying because of sexual orientation.” If teachers were bound by law to protect victims of bullying—regardless of the reasons why they were bullied—perhaps they would be more eager to act. It is no longer enough to just say, “Bullies are a part of growing up. They’ll get over it.” Even my generation of 20-somethings that grew up on dial-up did not have the level of exposure to bullying that kids today have. Now, when children under the age of 10 have smart phones and Facebook and Twitter accounts, home is no longer a safe place where they can get away from the bullying. Many of the children and teens who have committed suicide in recent years were bullied at school as well as online.
As many of us have probably been victims of bullying in the past, I would like my readers to think back to the worst bully you knew in middle school, and what they did to you or people you knew (or if you were the bully, think about what you did to others). Now think about the fact that some lobbyist groups who profess to be Christians concerned about family values want to protect that bully under the law “because of their freedom of religion.”
We can’t selectively protect some victims of bullying. If we are going to stop this rash of suicides, we cannot continue to pass on hate from one generation to the next.
In the middle of all these stories about children killing themselves and bullies being encouraged in their cruelty, there is one more thing that is really distressing to me as an American. In the year 2012, over 200 years after the founding of this country, thousands of years since the creation of Christianity and millions of years of human evolution later, I am writing to encourage people to treat their fellow human beings equally.
Is bullying a Christian value? If you believe that it is not, I would encourage you to make your thoughts known to lawmakers, and maybe they’ll realize that this is not what their constituents want.