North Carolina “Bully Bill” A Trojan Horse

The North Carolina House School Violence Prevention Act (HB 1366) is supposed to address the problems of bullying by mandating schools to adopt policies which would, hopefully but doubtfully, prevent or minimize this major discipline problem in public schools.  One of the strange and interesting aspects of this particular bill, however, is that it also creates special protections (extra rights) for students based on their sexual orientation.  In blunt terms, what this means is that if a bully hits your son who happens to be a heterosexual male, the bully will (hopefully) be punished according to standard policy.  If the bully hits another male student, who happens to be a homosexual, then the incident will have to receive extra attention and the bully would receive more than the standard punishment (treated more seriously).  In essence, the North Carolina House is identifying a special group of students (homosexuals) who will receive more protection than other (heterosexual) students.

The North Carolina Senate has already wisely rejected this bill once by deleting its pro-homosexual language and sending it back to the House for concurrence.  The House has now voted to send it back to the Senate in its original form.  The bill will probably come to the Senate floor for a vote by Friday, July18th.

The problem with this bill is that it will require schools to set up discipline policies that are very much like “hate-crime” laws.  “Hate-crime” laws should be unconstitutional because they give some citizens more rights and protections than other citizens.  The concept of “all men being created equal” and deserving “equal protection under the law” is tossed out of the window and under the bus when we start giving special protections to certain classes of citizens.  The whole idea of deciding if something is a “hate-crime” or not puts the judicial system in the mind-reading business.

Principal to Student Bully: “Bully, did you hit John because he is a homosexual or was there another reason?”

The fact that Bully hit John becomes less important than figuring out why he hit John and the “why” becomes the basis of punishment (if you can figure it out).  A crime is a crime.  Breaking school rules is breaking school rules.  Punishments should be consistent for all students who break the rules and all citizens who break the law.  A crime is no less a crime because it was committed against someone in a group that is not designated a special, protected group by the government.  Such thinking destroys the concept of “equal protection under the law.”