I like Lady Gaga. Her music performances and videos are entertaining, even to this decrepit old man (as my daughter calls me). However, I love the fact that Lady Gaga has taken up the cause of bullying. She has publicly requested a meeting with President Obama to discuss ways to increase public awareness of the constant and often ignored problem of bullying of LGBT youth, and seek ways that government can help deal with the problem. Specifically, she would lkike to see legislation passed designating bullying of LGBT youth a hate crime, in the wake of the suicide of Jamey Rodemeyer. From the Guardian:
Lady Gaga has announced she is to meet Barack Obama to discuss new legislation to counteract bullying. Following the recent suicide of a 14-year-old fan, Jamey Rodemeyer, a victim of bullies, the singer called on American lawmakers to make bullying illegal. Bullying, she tweeted, is a “hate crime”. […]
Jamey Rodemeyer, from Buffalo, New York, killed himself last weekend. Although Rodemeyer had participated in the It Gets Better campaign, offering his support to gay teenagers, he was the victim of bullying at his own school. On his blog, he wrote: “I always say how bullied I am, but no one listens.”
As news emerged of Rodemeyer’s death, Gaga expressed sorrow and frustration. “The past days I’ve spent reflecting, crying, and yelling,” she wrote earlier this week. “I have so much anger. It is hard to feel love when cruelty takes someone’s life.” That anger turned into resolve: “Bullying must become be illegal,” she tweeted. “It is a hate crime.”
The Obama administration has yet to confirm that it has agreed to meet with her, but in my opinion it would be a wise decision. It’s not likely he’s going to win votes from homophobes in any event, and I suspect Lady Gaga has a higher popularity rating among young people than he does right now. You know, the same young people who helped get him elected in 2008? Might be a good idea to meet with a pop icon who is well known for her support of LGBT issues and is also simply — well known.
Besides it would make the Tea Party Jihadists angry as sin (pun intended), since many of them support bullying of LGBT youth such as The California Christian Coalition, for one example:
At the California Republican Party convention held in Los Angeles last weekend, a number of social conservative groups purchased sponsorship tables. The Christian Coalition of California, a state chapter of the national organization founded by Pat Robertson, handed out pamphlets and urged attendees to continue to highlight the supposed dangers of what they called the “gay lifestyle.”
ThinkProgress spoke to Robert Newman, the head of the California Christian Coalition, who said his group would be mobilizing its members to repeal the gay education law signed by Gov. Jerry Brown (D-CA) earlier this year. Newman said the law, which “adds sexual orientation to the state’s existing anti-discrimination protections that prohibit bias in school activities, instruction, and instructional materials,” is unnecessary and encourages sexually transmitted diseases. The law also compels school districts to teach LGBT history alongside history of other California ethnic and minority groups.
Asked about the epidemic of gay suicides, Newman dismissed the issue, saying, “I hardly think bullying is a real issue in schools.” He reasoned that some level of bullying is “part of the maturational process” and that the law should be repealed because “there’s no reason to have a special bill for say three percent of the population, period.”
Personally, I’d put Lady Gaga’s moral values up against Mr. Newman’s anytime. He comes from the same crowd that cheered people dying from lack of health insurance and booed a combat soldier in Iraq simply because he was gay. So, President Obama, if you can have a beer summit, why not a Gaga summit?
I’m fully in favor of the anti-bullying campaign, and I think more can be done to protect kids in school. But you can’t turn the playground into a no-taunt zone enforceable by conviction for a hate crime.
If there is actual assault or battery, then of course you can consider that. But we’re criminalizing everything for these kids already. We can protect our kids better without making it a hate crime to talk shit on the playground. It trivializes actual hate crimes and it will ruin a lot more kids’ lives than it saves.
Lady Gaga is one of the few celebrities who could very well have something valuable to say to Barack Obama. She is a remarkably intelligent, informed, insightful person. We’re not talking about Ted Danson reading off cue cards about “our oceans” here.
Invite her on up, Mr. President. See what she has to say.
Enough with the rush to create new laws. What exactly are you asking, anyway, that the federal government make national laws against bullying and turn it into a federal case every time? And ask for the states, they already have laws on the books against assault, harassment, and intimidation. Creating a new anti-bullying law will do nothing but muddy the waters.
It’s tragic that this young man killed himself, but in the end that’s how HE chose to address the problem. Do his tormentors share some moral responsibility for his decision? Yes, but in the end it was his decision, not theirs, which led to his death and what you’re suggesting that we should do is criminalize the type of behavior which might lead a sensitive person to decide to take his own life. How exactly do you define the behavior? How many encounters does it take before it becomes full-scale bullying as opposed to just a disagreeable encounter between teens?
Drafting of such a law would be a semantic nightmare fraught with all sorts of possibilities, not the least of which is the establishment of a baseline for bullying teens who will now know how far they can go before being charged with a crime. Some things are not susceptible to laws, but to moral suasion and education and a change in societal norms. Bullying is bad, but you can’t legislate away boorish, oafish behavior but instead make it socially unacceptable.
None – as in, zero – of the anti-bullying efforts have come in the form of federal criminal laws, so we can stop worrying about that.
Creating a new anti-bullying law will do nothing but muddy the waters….what you’re suggesting that we should do is criminalize the type of behavior which might lead a sensitive person to decide to take his own life.
You really don’t know what you’re talking about here. Anti-bullying laws function as requirements that schools, administrators, and teachers 1) learn about bullying and how it works, and 2) act affirmatively to protect kids from having their rights and their opportunity to receive their education from being violated.
How exactly do you define the behavior? How many encounters does it take before it becomes full-scale bullying as opposed to just a disagreeable encounter between teens?
You know, you could actually look up anti-bullying laws and policies, and see for yourself how these things are defined, instead of assuming that you’ve raised an unanswerable question. In short, the answer is that this works a lot like sexual harassment, with the presence of a hostile environment that violates people’s rights being the defining factor.
Drafting of such a law would be a semantic nightmare…
It hasn’t been in any of the places where anti-bullying laws and policies have been implemented.
Bullying is bad, but you can’t legislate away boorish, oafish behavior but instead make it socially unacceptable.
We’re talking about rules and norms kids have to follow at school. Of course you can design and implement rules requiring kids attending school to behave appropriately.