Minnesota anti-bullying bill. Ultimate goal? Indoctrination.

Here's a short piece on the anti-bullying legislation which passed the House last year but failed to pass the Senate at the end of the Minnesota legislative session this past May.

Written by Walter Hudson, the piece points out what he believes will be the ultimate effect of the legislation  - not addressing bullying but indoctrinating young students.

Five-year-old Suzie heads off to kindergarten in rural Minnesota. She settles into her class routine full of activity, discovery, and friendship.

Then the day takes a turn. As part of newly mandated diversity training, Suzie’s teacher brings out Heather Has Two Mommies for some light mid-morning reading. A typically precocious kindergartener, Suzie pipes up during the story to correct the teacher’s telling. “God gave us a mommy and a daddy,” she exclaims.

Though no student takes exception to Suzie’s remark, the teacher cringes and becomes keenly aware of her state-mandated role to report any incident which could be construed as bullying. So Suzie gets pulled out of class and taken to the principal’s office where she’s met by a counselor.

There begins a process of formative intervention and remedial discipline. More than correction for objectively inappropriate behavior, this intervention focuses on changing who Suzie is, on correcting her values to ensure that she accepts each of her classmates and values their diverse backgrounds.

Confused, disturbed, and teary-eyed, Suzie comes away from the experience convinced she has done something wrong. Worse, she feels the very sense of rejection which her accusers claim to deplore. She learns her lesson, that the values taught at home are not welcome in school. A bit of her innocence dies. She grows more guarded, less expressive, and unfairly subdued.

Such a tale may be among the tamest of experiences awaiting children in Minnesota, if a task force of social engineers commissioned by Governor Mark Dayton succeed in lobbying for legislation which has already been approved by the State House. House File 826, misleadingly titled the Safe and Supportive Schools Act, serves as a trial balloon modeling what its supporters would like to implement nationally – a radical transformation of schools from institutions of academic achievement into political reeducation camps which correct Orwellian Wrong Think.

Sold colloquially as an “anti-bullying bill,” the proposed legislation actually institutionalizes bullying, targeting political minorities with suppressive badgering. The bill would repeal existing anti-bullying statutes which have proven effective. It would create an invasive, overbearing, and unfunded new state bureaucracy to impose politically correct values upon students, teachers, parents, staff, and anyone serving in or around the educational system. It would affect both public and private schools. In a state which already has one of the worst achievement gaps between white and black students in the nation, the bill would burden struggling districts with new mandates diverting precious resources away from academics. Teachers and staff will become thought police and value mediators, shifting their disciplinary focus from correcting inappropriate behavior to remediating students’ belief systems. As with any state bureaucracy, reams of new data will be generated and follow students throughout their academic career, if not the rest of their lives.

Are LGBT activists fighting bullying with bullying?

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.

Bullying of homosexual identified kids is down dramatically.

With an expected big push for anti-bullying legislation in the Minnesota legislature which goes beyond bullying to push social indoctrination, here's an interesting story reporting that bullying against homosexuals is actually down dramatically.

The seven-year study involved more than 4,000 teens in England who were questioned yearly through 2010, until they were 19 and 20 years old. At the start, just over half of the 187 gay, lesbian and bisexual teens said they had been bullied; by 2010 that dropped to 9 percent of gay and bisexual boys and 6 percent of lesbian and bisexual girls.

The researchers said the same results likely would be found in the United States.

 I'll be interested in seeing how activists for the new legislation respond to this report.
 

The real agenda behind some anti-bullying efforts.

All people are opposing to bullying.  Sadly, some are using this concern to push a different agenda.  Here's a great column by Katherine Kersten in the Sunday Star Tribune on the agenda behind some ostensibly anti-bullying efforts.

Who -- in the sensitive, civilized Minnesota of 2013 -- could possibly be in favor of bullying? If you were short or fat in sixth grade, you may have cringed from bullies yourself. If your kids have endured bullying, you've suffered through it with them. No child should have to put up with bullying. So how could a decent person oppose a campaign at our State Capitol to prevent it?

But what if the antibullying campaign now unfolding there has little to do with protecting the traditional targets of bullies: kids who are pudgy, shy or "vertically challenged"? What if it's driven instead by a political/cultural agenda that's not so much about stopping bad behavior as it is about using the machinery of state education to compel children to adopt politically correct attitudes on "the nature of human sexuality," "gender identity" and alternative family structures?

What if a new antibullying law would require private religious schools -- along with public schools -- to enforce this agenda, so families who don't want to subject their kids to indoctrination in state-approved views of sexuality have no educational refuge?

In the 2013 legislative session, you'll hear lots of warm, fuzzy language from lawmakers and public officials about protecting "all kids" from bullying. You'll read about hearings designed to break every legislator's heart with tearful stories about bullying.

But every Minnesotan with a child in public or private school should understand that there's more going on here than meets the eye. Antibullying legislation is coming early in the session; its final shape is unknown. But the legislative goalposts were set in August 2012 by Gov. Mark Dayton's Task Force on the Prevention of School Bullying, whose report announced recommendations on the shape a new law should take.

The task force called for throwing out Minnesota's current, "local control" antibullying law -- which requires every school board to adopt a written policy "prohibiting intimidation and bullying of any student" -- and replacing it with a sweeping new statewide antibullying regime administered from St. Paul.

That regime would include an expansive new definition of bullying; a comprehensive, mandatory antibullying policy for all public and private schools; "multi-cultural/anti-bias" education for all pre-K-12 students and annual training in antibullying strategies for all teachers, school staff and volunteers; the promotion of "values, attitudes and behaviors" that "understand the nature of human sexuality," and a new "school climate center" at the Minnesota Department of Education.

Why this new law? The task force appears to presuppose that bullying is a pervasive and growing problem. In fact, however, incidents of bullying and intimidation have dropped markedly in recent years, according to surveys by the Department of Justice.

And while the task force gives the impression that LGBT students are a primary focus of bullying, evidence suggests that the vast majority of bullying is directed at other students. The DOJ surveys indicate that the percentage of 12- to 18-year-old students who reported being targets of hate-related words based on their sexual orientation fell from 1.0 percent in 2007 to 0.6 percent in 2009.

The campaign for antibullying legislation is driven not by a dramatic escalation in bullying but by a crusade to use the power of the state to shape your 10-year-old's attitudes and beliefs about sexuality and family structure. The drive is being led by OutFront Minnesota -- the state's most prominent LGBT group, whose legal director was a member of the governor's task force and whose executive director also directs the "Safe Schools for All Coalition."

The governor's task force gives the green light to activist groups like OutFront to move into public and private schools. It calls for "actively enlisting ... community-based advocacy groups" to "chang[e] peer and community norms" and develop bullying-intervention strategies.

Not surprisingly, the task force's proposed new antibullying regime would not treat all children equally, despite lip service to this goal. Instead, it focuses on students in "protected classes," including sexual orientation and "gender identity or expression."

Under the task force's vague and overbroad definitions of bullying and harassment, students could be punished for "direct or indirect interactions" that other students --especially those in protected groups -- claim to find "humiliating" or "offensive," that have a "detrimental effect" on their "social or emotional health," or even that promote a "perceived imbalance of power."

By this standard, a student who voices reservations about same-sex marriage could be accused of bullying LGBT students.

Here's an example of elementary school kids being targeted with this agenda.

We get a sense of what may be on the horizon from "Welcoming Schools" -- a K-5 "antibullying" program developed by the Human Rights Campaign, a gay and transgender advocacy group. The program was scheduled to be piloted at Hale Community School in Minneapolis in 2008.

"Welcoming Schools" had little to do with bullying, and much to do with ensuring that kids as young as age 5 submit to the group's orthodoxy on sexuality and family structure.

The curriculum advised teachers not to call students "boys and girls," on grounds this can create "internal dissonance" in some children. It called for students to read books like "Sissy Duckling," and to be evaluated on "whether or not [they] feel comfortable making choices outside gender expectations." Kids in grades three to five "acted out" being members of nontraditional families, including same-sex-headed families.

In lesson after lesson, teachers were instructed to urge their students -- ages 5 to 11 -- to reject traditional views on sexuality and family structure as hurtful "stereotypes," and to use group exercises and classic indoctrination techniques to pressure them to adopt the curriculum designers' attitudes and beliefs.

At Hale, parent concerns prompted removal of some of the curriculum's most controversial aspects.

The governor's task force recommendations could entail serious consequences for dissenting students. The report includes language suggesting that students who express views that others consider offensive could be referred for "counseling" or "mental health needs.

The activists gathering at the State Capitol march under the banner of tolerance. Yet many seek to use state power to impose their own beliefs on others -- including parents who exercise their rights of conscience by choosing private schools that teach Christian, Jewish or Muslim beliefs on sexuality.

Yesterday's champions of tolerance, it seems, are becoming the bullies of today.

Thank you Governor Pawlenty

On Saturday, Governor Tim Pawlenty vetoed SF 971, the so-called anti-bullying bill. Gov. Pawlenty correctly asserted that the bill was duplicative as Minnesota already has a law prohibiting all kinds of bullying.

The name “anti-bullying” sounds innocuous, but the bill would have required that Minnesota public schools indoctrinate your children and grandchildren to affirm homosexual marriage and unhealthy sexual behavior. In his veto letter, Gov. Pawlenty wisely asked the Department of Education to review its anti-bullying policy and instruct school districts to enforce it.

Like you, MFC opposes all kinds of bullying. Please join Gov. Pawlenty in making sure your school enforces its anti-bullying policy and teach your children to refrain from all kinds of bullying - including GLBT children. Anti-bullying starts in the home.

CLICK HERE to send an email to Gov. Tim Pawlenty and thank him for vetoing SF 971 or call him at 651-296-3391. Also, thank him for opposing or vetoing the following:

• Marriage and Family Protection Act – A bill to legalize homosexual marriage
• Recognize homosexual marriages performed in other states
• Delete all references of man, woman, husband and wife from Minnesota marriage law
• Legalize homosexual civil unions
• Medical Marijuana - vetoed
• Various domestic partnership bills designed to legalize homosexual marriage

Thank you Governor Pawlenty!

Bullying bill little more than ideology and sexual politics

If SF971/HF1198 were about eliminating bullying, I would support it, however the bills are a thinly disguised attempt to force Minnesota public schools to indoctrinate children and school officials into affirming same-sex marriage, and unhealthy sexual behavior.

Huh?

The mandate will require a curriculum, (conveniently left out of the bill) that will address GLBT bullying. One curriculum that is being used, (under duress at Hale Elementary) is called "Welcoming Schools" developed by the Human Rights Campaign, the largest GLBT lobbying group in the United States. After a careful review of “Welcoming Schools,” it is certain that the techniques, lessons and materials used – do indeed encourage and reward children to question what they are taught about healthy sexual behavior and the definition of marriage and family.

There is no scientific evidence that proves teaching children to affirm homosexual behavior and same-sex marriage will eliminate bullying, but there is a mountain of scientific evidence that shows homosexual sex is unhealthy and that children need a mother and a father.

Schools should be teaching children to affirm healthy sexual behavior and families, not indoctrinating them with ideology and sexual politics.

We can stop bullying without forcing elementary children to affirm unhealthy homosexual behavior and same-sex marriage.

Pro-homosexual anti-bullying bill would bully students, teachers and parents.

Homosexual activists are at it again. They're pushing a bill SF 971/HF 1198 which would replace Minnesota's anti-bullying policy, which requires school districts to develop policies addressing all forms of bullying, with one giving specific protections to homosexuals, bisexuals, transvestites, etc. The goal of this policy isn't to address and stop all forms of bullying, something all people can agree with. Rather it seeks to insert "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" into the law so homosexual activists can then pressure school districts to introduce pro-homosexual, anti-bullying programs into the schools. This is a thinly disguised effort to promote acceptance of homosexual marriage, homosexual behavior and gender identity.

An example of this effort is the "Welcoming Schools" curriculum, a Human Rights Campaign creation, currently being pushed in Hale Elementary School in Minneapolis. HRC is the nation's largest homosexual advocacy group. The curriculum is billed as an anti-bullying program which seeks to address “family diversity, including LGBT families, and it addresses anti-gay bias within discussions of bullying”.

An example of their efforts is trying to “expand student’s notions of gender appropriate behavior” through such books as "King and King”, a fairy tale of two princes who fall in love, kiss and get married. This book is targeted at kids five and six years of age. You don't think this is trying to indoctrinate kids? It also seeks to evaluate and assess kids beliefs by having them regularly answer the question: “I used to think, but now I know….”

This bullying bill is merely an effort to bully parents and teachers into silence and have kids embrace the homosexual agenda.