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Print 3 Comments January 5th , 2012 10:54 am

Christian activist Fowler makes stand on bullying

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NASHVILLE (AP) — Conservative activist David Fowler of Signal Mountain favors legislative efforts to discourage student bullying but his group disagrees with providing special consideration for gay students.

Fowler, a former Republican state senator, is president of the Family Action Council of Tennessee. The group’s December newsletter says it wants “to make sure (the legislation) protects the religious liberty and free speech rights of students who want to express their views on homosexuality.”

Fowler told the Chattanooga Times Free Press that “the purpose is to stop bullying, not create special classes of people who are more important than others.”

Leaders of the gay rights advocacy group Tennessee Equality Project contend the legislation would give students a “license to bully” by allowing them to hide their irrational biases behind an extreme religious belief.

The Senate sponsor of changes to the bullying law, Sen. Jim Tracy, R-Shelbyville, is “reviewing the legislation” and will likely “narrow” the current bill, a Tracy aide said Tuesday.

The bill backed by Fowler says anti-bullying programs and measures can’t use materials or training that “explicitly or implicitly promote a political agenda (and) make the characteristics of the victim the focus rather than the conduct of the person engaged in harassment, intimidation, or bullying.”

In a posting on the Tennessee Equality Project’s website, the group’s president, Jonathan Cole, said things were difficult for gay students last year. He referred to the suicide of Jacob Rogers, a student who experienced years of anti-gay bullying at Cheatham County Central High School in Ashland City.

Cole said the legislation will only increase risks to students.

Fowler said gays are “not the only people who get insulted. The thing we need to concentrate on is not whether the characteristics of the victim justify being protected but on the conduct of the person engaging in the bullying while respecting constitutional rights.”

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  • Anonymous

    It seems that everyone is so darned thin-skinned these days. Rudness and insults are as old as mankind. When we start declaring that speaking our mind is a form of bullying we have just put a gag order on humanity. Why don’t we all just turn into robots, or Stepford Wives type people. That way we could only speak the sweet words with which we were programmed. But WHO gets to do the programming? Scary enough?

    • Anonymous

      I agree that people need to sack up and deal with people saying things they do not like to hear. There is not a right to not be offended or have one’s feelings hurt.

      That’s not what this is about, though. This is about kids who are victims of systematic harassment and bullying, some of whom feel the only way to make it stop is suicide. That is not okay. There are groups of people who want to make this acceptable, as long as the people who are doing the harassing can claim that they’re expressing their religious beliefs.

      Time to stop giving superstitious nonsense a free pass.

  • Anonymous

    It’s time to stop letting people use their religious beliefs as an excuse for their behavior. If you want to sincerely believe that your loving god is going to torture homosexuals for eternity after they die because a really old book said so, that’s your inalienable right.

    But that doesn’t mean that you deserve a free pass for harassing people because of it. When kids are killing themselves because of systematic harassment for their sexual orientation, there is a problem.

    It’s 2011, and it’s time for people to grow up. Believe whatever you like about your magic sky daddy, but don’t expect the rest of us to take you seriously or permit you to harass other people because of it.

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