Monday, March 19, 2012

A response to novelist Silas House on the faux "bullying bill"

Novelist Silas House complains about legislators on a State House committee who voted down the so-called "bullying bill" (HB 336) on the grounds that the bullying law passed in 2008 already protects all students.

House says the “logic” of these legislators "falls short." Laws that protect everyone, he argues, don't protect everyone and so what we need to do is to specify who everyone is. Only then will everyone be protected.

Apparently it's just too hard for our school officials to figure out who "everyone" is.

In reality, HB 336 was a cynical attempt by a political group to use the tragedies of several students to promote their own political agenda. If groups like the Fairness Campaign want to pursue laws that benefit their constituency, they should do it with a law that’s properly labeled, not one that masquerades as something that it isn’t.

If current laws that already prohibit bulling aren’t enough, then why is one gay rights group going to schools around the state saying that current laws are enough to deal with this problem and asking schools to do so?

The chairman of the House committee refused to hear testimony from opponents of the bill and after it was voted down anyway, the leader of the Fairness Campaign made a spectacle of himself in the Capitol Annex hallway by engaging in the same threatening and intimidating behavior the bill he was supporting prohibits.

But maybe House didn’t know about these things, since the CJ didn’t report them.

Should we specify who should be protected from murder and stealing by listing all the different types of people who shouldn’t be murdered and stolen from?

That may make logical sense to House, but to us it clearly “falls short.”

2 comments:

R.A. Litherland said...

It's "The Hollow Men", not "The Wasteland". Getting that wrong rather vitiates all the following cultural comment, don't you think?

Martin Cothran said...

R. A. Litherland,

I think you meant to make this comment on another post. We all make mistatkes, don't we?

But I'm curious as to why you think this vitiates the entire rest of the post.