ricketyclick

I keep a Live Journal account so that I can comment on other people’s Journals. Otherwise, I post my original stuff here.

Making an exception today, in response to one of LJs regular mass-emails to its users:

In recognition of the need to invoke a zero tolerance policy against anti-LGBT bullying in schools, we’re pleased to offer a charitable vgift. We’ll be contributing 100% of proceeds (we’ll cover payment processing fees) to Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, an organization dedicated to ending hate-based bullying and homophobia in schools. We hope you’ll join us in supporting this vital mission. If you’re getting involved today, or everyday, in the fight for LGBT rights and awareness, we’d love to hear about it in comments.

I replied, in comments, and for the first time, in my Journal:

OK, yeah, I have some comments:

• Zero-tolerance anything amounts, always, to zero-intelligence, knee-jerk tyranny. Oh, I’ll grant zero-tolerance to actual crimes. But nobody ever says, “we have a zero-tolerance policy towards murder”. No, “zero tolerance” always refers to clamping down on some politically incorrect behavior that is, in fact, NOT criminal, or ought not to be.  See “zero tolerance for drugs”, which attacks children for bringing their own aspirin or prescriptions to school, and leaves them and their possessions vulnerable to random strip and drug-dog searches. Or “zero tolerance for weapons”, which attacks children for drawing pictures of guns, carrying plastic toy soldiers in their pockets, or wearing t-shirts supporting their military parent. Zero tolerance only gives officialdom the excuse to bully students based on rumor, non-conformity, political incorrectness, or perceived insufficient respect for authority. (Hint: tyrants never recognize sufficient respect. “Sufficient” is undefined and elastic, and means whatever the official of the moment needs it to mean to achieve the desired effect.)
• Bullying is bad, in and of itself. It comprises the crimes of extortion, assault, and battery, at the very least. The only reason we tag it “bullying” is because it’s traditionally done by children, who are assumed to not have an adult sense of responsibility, and who need to be corrected without attracting the very heavy hand of the law; and it performed against children, presumed to be incapable or unwilling to mount a proper defense — often because they’ve been taught that “violence is always bad” or that “violence never solves anything”.
• Singling out anti-LGBT bullying as being exceptionally heinous is politically correct bullying, if not outright assault, battery, and extortion, in and of itself. It is a thought crime, and only tyrannies recognize or punish thought crime.
• “Zero tolerance” for “anti-LGBT bullying also leads to inequality before the law. It establishes a protected class, inherently excluding non-members from its umbrella. It says, in effect, OK for LGBT students to bully their straight classmates, not okay for the victims to defend themselves. This is officially sanctioned tyranny of the minority over the majority.
• There is no official action that can be effective against bullying of any kind. Bullying will never be seen by teachers or principals, is rarely witnessed by other students willing to “testify”, and it typically leaves no evidence of the kind that can be used in a court of law, or to invoke any level of actual due process.
• The one and only effective remedy for bullying is to teach children to make bullies pay on the spot, to fight back, to go down fighting, if necessary. Yes, this means acknowledging that violence does indeed sometimes solve problems. Tough shit, paccies.
• As someone once said, I look for a world in which black gay men have a closet full of guns. As someone else [Oleg Volk] said, “Bash This!“

BTW, while editing LJ messy HTML to work correctly here, I discovered that the donation link in their message goes to GLSEN.

GLSEN…GLSEN…where have I heard…?

Ah.

GLSEN’s anti-LGBT-bullying “Safe Schools” campaign has been charged with doing far more than protecting differently-gendered students, it’s actively pushing an aggresive LGBT agenda on school children, right down to kindergarten. GLSEN’s founder, Kevin Jennings, was appointed by Pres. Obama to head the administration’s Safe Schools initiative. Turns out, though, he’s a bigot.

Shame on LJ. Shame.