Matt’s Safe School Law, otherwise known as Michigan’s “anti-anti-bullying law” is an embarrassment and juvenile.  It is the pre-emptive self-defense of bigotry, and just like the nation’s first foray with the Bush Doctrine, this has a profound effect on people’s real lives.  It hurts people.  Real people.  Not mythical, hypothetical, potential people.  Real, living people who are trying to survive the hardest part of their lives: the school-age years.

Rachel at Autostraddle has given the most direct response to the bill I’ve seen, attacking its fundamental problems, including the precise issue that it doesn’t actually handle bullying for what it is: domination.

What advocates of the bill (predictably) have put forward is a defense of free speech argument.  Rachel’s strongest response is this:

… the First Amendment allows us freedom of speech, [but] constitutional rights have always been different in public schools. That’s why schools can enforce a three-inch-wide tank top strap rule, or search students’ lockers for drugs. Like it or not, students aren’t guaranteed the same constitutional rights on school property, and neither are their teachers — public school teachers have gotten in serious trouble for personal opinions (perhaps based on “moral convictions,” even) that weren’t even about or addressed to their own students, and were on their own time. Americans are guaranteed free speech, but school employees are charged with the safety and care of their students above all else, and it’s a shocking reversal of mission to change that for the sake of, of all things, religious principles — after all, the Constitution also guarantees us separation of church and state.

We place these issues in a traditional power-struggle that is often seen as an either/or struggle between free speech and protection of minority groups.  For most of us, in the end, this view is sufficient.  But the problem for the free speech advocates in these cases is that they aren’t actually supportive of free speech.  In the post, Rachel quotes an advocate of the bill who is trying to protect the abuser from retaliation.  His argument is that (conservative, fundamentalist) Christians are subject to ridicule when they say mean things about LGBT people.  His defense is of a self-defense of aggression.

Free Speech is intended to be about both individual and collective liberty.  It is about our ability to speak our mind and do what we do without fear.  Except, and it has always been the exception, when your speech hurts someone else.  Rachel’s argument above is right on and simple, because free speech has been restricted in schools.  But I think the problem is broader.  That free speech, by definition, excludes your liberty to destroy my liberty.

Conservatives know that words aren’t only words.  They know that words hurt.  They know that words can even kill.  The problem is that right now, they are operating as if it is kill-or-be-killed.  And that stuff isn’t Christian.

That’s the rub isn’t it?  The very speech they want to protect is hate speech eisogetically removed from Scripture and thrown through a blender of both Platonic dualism and modernist thinking and poured out in a smoothie glass and called literalism. It is not the gospel but a juvenile defense of bigotry. How dare they call this protection.

 

“Bully” is © trix0r through Creative Commons

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