The real agenda behind [the] antibullying campaign
Guess who wrote the op-ed that runs under that hed?
This is an op-ed that will run in the Sunday Strib on January 13, 2013, unless Scotty Gillespie comes to his senses and kills it. Unlikely.
Katherine Kersten asks in the lede:
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? [emphasis added]
Right back at you, Katie.
Kersten’s theory (you don’t really need to read the piece to know this, do you?) is that efforts to keep kids from being bullied to death are really an attack on her bigoted religious beliefs. She is afraid that all those sixth grade evangelists who tell a classmate that he is going to hell are gonna get detention. She so would have been there, so for perhaps the first time in her life there is empathy in her calcified little heart, for somebody, anyway.
“What is wrong with leaving it up to the local schools?” wails Kersten. Well, several kids dead by suicide, a large judgement, and a federal civil rights consent order against the district, to name just a few things, in the Anoka Hennepin School District alone.
You ought to read the papers, Katie.
It is obvious that some school districts, like Anoka Hennepin, are willing — and urged by some parents — to look the other way on some kinds of bullying.
But if you’re willing to give that a pass, why worry about Jim Crow in the south? It’s the same principle, just a little closer to home.
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