Fred Ray sent this to me a while ago, but I never got around to it. I should have.
Some people in South Florida who fancy themselves “human rights” activists have opposed an anti-bullying bill because it doesn’t single out blacks and gays.
Protesters said the proposed legislation, written by Rep. Ellyn Bogdanoff, R-Fort Lauderdale, fails to specifically ban bullying based on race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or physical ability or appearance. They asked constituents to demand Bogdanoff make changes to reflect minority groups.
….
Bogdanoff, reached in her Tallahassee office, said she would not use selective language to define who should be protected because she does not want to uphold the safety of one child over another.
“They are saying there are certain children who deserve more protection than others,” said Bogdanoff. “I want to protect all children.”
Protect all children equally? Sounds like another one of those anti-civil rights racists….
John,
Sorry this is so long, but it’s a subject I’m personally invested in.
Your link doesn’t work, but typing “Bogdanoff” and “bullying” into Google gets you a ton of material from the Florida media and various activist groups. A sample:
From the Miami Herald, 4/2/06:
“It is essential and vital to identify specific categories that are the most prevalent ways of bullying,” said Deborah Perez, a junior at Booker T. Washington Senior High in Miami and vice president of Miami-Dade Public Schools’ student-government association. “You can’t prevent something unless you talk about it. Identifying specific students who are commonly known to be victims of bullying can be beneficial to students, faculty and staff when it comes to training.”
Same paper, 4/18:
Existing policies in Broward and Miami-Dade, which include specific categories like race, sexual orientation and religion, were held up Monday as models the rest of the state should follow.
“We cannot allow them to be repealed overnight with some broad, lukewarm legislation,” said Stratton Pollitzer, South Florida director for Equality Florida, a gay-rights group that has led opposition to the legislation.
From the Human Rights Campaign website:
[Bogdanoff’s] bill (HB 535) would scrap policies such as those in Miami-Dade and Broward counties that specifically bar harassment based on factors that include gender, ethnicity, race, religion, marital status or sexual orientation, American Civil Liberties Union spokeswoman Rebecca Steele said.
“What the (U.S.) Supreme Court and the nation have noticed is that when you are trying to single out and protect people who have been targets of bullying and violence, it’s necessary to enumerate categories,” Steele said.
From station WJHG’s website:
High school senior Ronald Bilbao came to the Capitol to argue that the bill doesn’t go far enough because it doesn’t spell out who it protects.
“We’re talking about the gay student, the black student, the Muslim student. These are the people who we know get bullied.”
On all of which, as one who was badly bullied as a kid, I call b*llsh*t.
Look at the excerpt you quoted:
Protesters said the proposed legislation, written by Rep. Ellyn Bogdanoff, R-Fort Lauderdale, fails to specifically ban bullying based on race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or physical ability or appearance. They asked constituents to demand Bogdanoff make changes to reflect minority groups.
Notice anything missing here? Like maybe “being the new kid at school”? “Nerdiness”? “Shyness”? “Preferring classical music to pop”? “Reading for fun”? Really, now, the people quoted in these articles haven’t a clue about the “categories” of students who actually are bullied, or why it happens. They certainly show no indication that they’ve ever been bullied themselves.
The subject is, of course, complicated by the fact that once bullies have a target, they will use any weapon they can get their hands on, which includes every dirty or otherwise taboo word or concept in their repertories. It doesn’t have to make sense; it just has to have a chance of wounding. And of course, if there are signs of distress from the victim, it will be used again and again. I remember the weapons used against me. They were puerile in the extreme (well, duh), but used with such persistence that eventually it was just too much.
But my point is that they were just the sort of sexual/racial/sexual orientation/&c.-type attacks that activists think are evidence that sexual/racial/orientation/&c. harassment are rife in schools. I don’t think that’s so. Kids just strike with anything they know that’s supposed to be a really nasty thing to call someone, and see if it works. Let’s see . . . I was a “lezzie.” I had “n*gg*r lips.” My parents were up to all sorts of interesting erotic activities, and I was also keen on them. Oh, and I was so skinny that my mother obviously didn’t feed me enough. You get the idea. Nothing true here, nothing even plausible (would that the “skinny” dig were!), just random blows. The point is that had I been gay, or part-Black (OK, Cobra, entirely Black in the opinion of some), or emaciated, or anything else that I was called, I should probably have reacted in some way making it clear to my tormentors that they had an effective weapon in hand. The result would look as though race or sexual orientation or “physical appearance” or some such was the cause of the persecution, when actually it was just a means.
This is why stuff like the objection to this bill as originally propounded absolutely infuriates me. These idiots can’t understand that what they’re calling, say, anti-gay bias is nine times out of ten a kid calling another kid a “lezzie” by way of throwing another stone in the bag, and occasionally hitting an actual lesbian more or less by accident. I don’t think the girl who called me a “lezzie” even knew what the word meant (I sure didn’t at the time); she just knew she wasn’t supposed to use it.
For what it’s worth, my schools always dealt with the problem promptly once I nerved myself to talk about it. My parents stepped in in sixth grade, then got me skipped the next year to eighth. That settled school hours, but left the school bus ride, which was getting impossible by ninth grade. Not wanting to go running to the parentals again, I more or less bugged myself with my mom’s mini tape recorder one afternoon trip home, made a transcript, and deposited tape and transcript with the principal the next day. No further problem, thanks to him. I realize that not everyone has school administrators as conscientious as that, but that’s my whole point: under the existing rules in some Florida districts, mine would have been a back-burner sort of situation, because I wasn’t minority, gay, disabled, &c. I don’t think my being a girl would have done me much good, given that all of my persecutors were other girls. I see no reason why other kids in my situation should not have equal support from administrators, and I can see no purpose to a policy such as Bogdanoff’s original bill would have banned except to focus attention away from students not in “preferred” categories.
So far as I can tell, John, Bogdanoff modified the bill to permit the districts with enumerated lists to keep them, and it passed the Legislature with no dissenting votes; the Senate’s bill needed to be reconciled with it, and I think one report said that it would have to wait till Fall.