The AP reports:
The House approved a version last year requiring school districts to adopt anti-bullying and harassment policies. The bill identified potential bullying acts as those that may be based on a person’s race, religion, physical appearance or sexual orientation. But the Senate later removed the list.
The final measure restores a list that includes sexual orientation.
You see, the General Assembly in its collective wisdom (does that sound ironic?) knows that North Carolina teachers and administrators don’t know how to recognize bullying. So it has decided to legislate what bullying is, and by drafting legislation they have to make political considerations as to what can be defined as “bullying.”
Rather than leaving it up to the judgment of the school authorities closest to the situation, the legislators have decided that school bullying, like everything else imaginable, is in need of the hammer of legislation. And in doing so, they will render an issue that requires discernment on the part of educators into something that requires rote adherence to a political checklist; i.e., if the obvious bullying isn’t based on the victim’s “race, religion, physical appearance or sexual orientation,” then it won’t count as “bullying.”
So kids, if you want to bully, just make fun of some kid’s Daddy, or say he’s got cooties, or make fun of his name, or poke fun at his family income, or whatever other kinds of taunts strike your fancy except for those four things.
