Here's an interesting perspective on the bullying issue by Anthony Esolen, an English Professor at Providence College in Rhode Island. Are LGBT activists fighting bullying with bullying is the gist of
his piece.
On June 19, the US District Court for the Eastern District of
Michigan ruled in favor of a high school student named Daniel Glowacki,
who had charged that his high school teacher, Jay McDowell, had violated
his constitutional right to freedom of speech. He was granted one
dollar in compensation. The court’s verdict, in vulgar terms, was that
the pig had the right to say what he said.
The facts, according to the court’s judgment, are these.
On October 20, 2011, the Gay Straight Alliance at Howell High School
planned to take part in a national “campaign aimed at raising awareness
of the bullying of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered youth.” The
court acknowledges that the day is also called “Spirit Day,” which, the
plaintiffs contended, is so-called to foster acceptance in the public
schools of the homosexual lifestyle. The Gay Straight Alliance made up
flyers to be posted all around the school, urging students to wear
purple on that day as a sign of their solidarity with homosexual
teenagers. The principal approved the flyer.
Wendy Hiller, one of the teachers, printed a batch of purple
T-shirts, reading “Tyler’s Army” on the front and “Fighting Evil with
Kindness” on the back. She had, in the past, worn a black shirt reading
“Tyler’s Army.” The name refers to Tyler Clementi, a freshman at Rutgers
who took his own life after his roommate had secretly filmed him in a
homosexual encounter. Hiller, says the court, in evident agreement, did
not believe that the shirts would be controversial, since the topic was
bullying and not homosexuality. Hiller sold some of the shirts to other
teachers at cost.
Jay McDowell, an economics teacher, bought one of those shirts and
wore it in class that day. McDowell then showed his students a video
about a gay teenager who committed suicide, and devoted the rest of the
class period to discussion.
Daniel entered McDowell’s classroom for the sixth period that day.
McDowell noticed that one of the girls in class was wearing a belt
buckle with the Confederate flag. He ordered her to take it off, because
it offended him. Daniel then asked the obvious question. Why should it
be all right for so many students and teachers to wear the purple
T-shirts, but not all right for the girl to wear the belt buckle?
Consider the great difference here in boldness and specificity and
intention. The belt buckle expresses a feeling of pride or affection for
the American South. It is small. It does not demand to be noticed and
read. It does not say anything. It is not a part of a school-wide
campaign. It is not as if the student, together with others throughout
the school, wore it on her shirt, with the words, “The South shall rise
again.” It is also a private thing; she is just one student.
McDowell then, predictably, told Glowacki that the Confederate flag
was a symbol of hateful things, like “the slashing and hanging of
[African Americans].” It was discriminatory against blacks. Glowacki
responded that the purple T-shirts were discriminatory against
Catholics. This prompted a heated exchange. The young man is no
theologian, and the teacher no moral philosopher. McDowell says that he
told Glowacki that it was all right if his religion said that homosexual
behavior was wrong, but that Glowacki could not say that in class. He
also says, missing the illogic and the aggressiveness of his statement,
that he told Glowacki that to say “I don’t accept gays” is like saying
“I don’t accept blacks.” When Glowacki replied, “I don’t accept gays,”
McDowell threw him out and began disciplinary action against him.
The parents complained, and McDowell was issued a reprimand: “You
disciplined two students for holding and stating personal beliefs, to
which you disagree. You disciplined them in anger under the guise of harassment and bullying because
you opposed their religious belief and were offended by it. The
students were causing no disruption.” Indeed, the reprimand specifically
states that McDowell attempted to get Daniel to “recant,” and notes the
irony that this should occur on a day devoted to fighting bullies.
What happened to Daniel after that is instructive, and does not enter
the court’s opinion, though it easily might have, since it provides
abundant evidence for the plaintiff’s contention that the Anti-Bullying
Day was really a Pro-Gay Day, and that Jay McDowell was himself a bully.
McDowell went on television claiming that Glowacki had entered the
classroom spewing epithets against gays—a claim which, if true, the
court would certainly have seized upon. Glowacki was (and continues to
be) vilified across the nation. The lesbian Ellen DeGeneres featured a
gay student on her television show who testified for McDowell in the
disciplinary hearings.
There are two points I wish to make. The first is that the
superintendent’s ironical insight did not go nearly far enough—the
bullying was not limited to that incident in the classroom. The second
is that the state is acting as a church, engaged in catechesis. The
superintendent was correct; no student should be constrained to make an auto da fé. Those
confessions, rather, ought to be procured over years of badgering,
cajoling, wheedling, insinuating, urging, tempting, persuading,
ridiculing, debating, by all means fair and foul, so long as the façade
of “objectivity” and religious “neutrality” and “respect” for the
students—but never for the parents!—be maintained.
On the bullying: the students know that what is going on here is the
advocacy of homosexual activity. Many people are bullied, for all kinds
of reasons—for being fat, or stupid, or poor, or ugly. If the school
wishes to teach gallantry and kindness, why not do so with as broad a
sweep as possible? But the teachers and students chose Tyler Clementi as
their cause célèbre.
Homosexual activists do not say that Clementi was merely the victim
of a nasty roommate. Their point—as the students at Howell High School
no doubt were made well aware—is that Clementi was the victim of a
general disapproval of his behavior. That is, any disapproval of the homosexual life is to be construed as homophobic, without regard to reasons or persons. That is precisely the message conveyed by the purple T-shirts.
The message may be unfolded thus. If you do not wear this shirt, or if you do not approve of the life it celebrates, you are evil. You’re
a bully. You want people like Tyler Clementi to die. The
superintendent, but not the court, notes that Glowacki was held up to
opprobrium in the classroom.
Neither the superintendent nor the court expresses any concern about
the massive contradiction that McDowell could order a student to remove a
belt buckle because it might create a hostile environment for some
other students, while not noticing that the entire school bristles with
hostility against Catholics, evangelical Protestants, orthodox Jews, and
anybody else who holds that sexual intercourse is to be bound within
marriage, between a man and a woman.
Which brings me to my second point. If I hire a man to teach my son
economics, I’d be shocked to learn that he’d been using his position to
run down my faith. Granted that students, because of their age and the
special circumstances, do not possess complete freedom of expression in
school, it is equally true that teachers and schools must not capitalize
upon their strength, their numbers, and their separation from the home,
to advocate what is essentially a religion, with its (peculiar and incoherent) set of universal demands and condemnations.
Suppose it were not a Confederate belt buckle that McDowell had
ordered removed, but a placard reading “Thou shalt not bear false
witness against thy neighbor.” That commandment—nowadays not
controversial, though we obey it no better than any generation ever
has—would be proscribed, as “religious” speech. But “thou shalt not
disapprove publicly of the homosexual lifestyle,” which is what “Tyler’s
Army” means, and in an aggressive and accusatory way, with the aim of
silencing those who might disagree, and humiliating those who might
express that disagreement—that is plastered all over the school and on
the bodies of the teachers themselves, the masters, whom the students
are supposed to respect or at least tolerate, since their future in part
rests in those teachers’ hands.
What gives these schools the right to engage in that catechesis? The
business of the public school is akin to the business of a group of
tutors hired by a group of parents. It has become, instead, the business
of a group of self-imagined forward-thinking missionaries introducing
students to their new and enlightened world, against the supposed
inertia and ignorance of parents, pastors, and the great majority of
moral philosophers and theologians older than yesterday.
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