Religious right defends ‘faith-based’ harassment

September 4, 2012 | Filed under: Alliance Defense Fund,Discrimination/Abuse,Focus on the Family,Views | Posted by: Rob Boston

If you’re the parent of young or teenaged kids, you’re probably concerned about bullying. It’s one of those unpleasant facts of life that just about everyone who has children must eventually confront.

Since children spend much of their time in school, those institutions are the focal point for anti-bullying efforts. Thankfully, the national conversation over this issue has become a lot more serious in recent years, and many schools have adopted anti-bullying policies.

This has alarmed the Religious Right. Groups like Focus on the Family (FOF) and the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) are worried that fundamentalist Christian young people in public schools won’t be able to properly harass gays, atheists and non-Christians if anti-bullying policies spread. So they’ve more or less formed a pro-bullying caucus designed to shoot down as many of the policies as possible.

A new FOF-ADF salvo takes the form of a document called the “Anti-Bullying Policy Yardstick,” which purports to help public school officials formulate policies that respect the rights of Christian students. In reality, FOF and the ADF are seeking to gut anti-bullying policies by making them utterly ineffective.

I was struck by a number of things about the document:

It attempts to carve out an exemption for protected “religious” bullying. In several states, Religious Right groups have attempted to exempt bullying and verbal harassment based on sincere religious beliefs. In other words, a fundamentalist Christian kid can harass a gay student as much as he wants as along as he sincerely believes what he is saying. Some yardstick there!

It seeks to gut reporting requirements. One way to combat bullying is to require that the people in charge – mainly teachers – report it when they see it. FOF and the ADF recommend dropping this requirement entirely. They claim this will somehow protect teachers from liability. In fact, it does just the opposite.

It advises school officials to ignore what kids do after hours or online. According to FOF and the ADF, school officials have no authority to respond to what students say or do online after school hours because this is free speech. So, if a bunch of students are using Facebook’s chat feature to discuss how they plan to beat the tar out of Phil the next day because he’s gay and a teacher gets wind of this, she’s just supposed to throw up her hands and say, “Oh well, that’s free speech!”

It tells schools they have no right to educate bullies about why their behavior is wrong. According to FOF and the ADF, such “re-education” is bad because it is designed to “change the way they think.” Pardon my bluntness, but if young people have the belief that they can bully others, they need to change the way they think – and if they won’t, they should be expelled.

It warns schools to avoid anti-bullying materials produced by “homosexual activist groups.” Since many of the young people who are bullied in schools are gay (or perceived to be gay), it seems that the “homosexual activist groups” might have some special expertise in this area. Perhaps schools should listen to them.

What’s most offensive about the FOF-ADF document is that it purports to outline the differences between “good” anti-bullying policies and “bad” ones. In fact, these organizations don’t support any anti-bullying efforts at all. Schools that adopt their suggestions would be left with toothless policies that give budding fundamentalist bigots license to harass anyone they want. If they resort to physical violence, the school might be able to stop them – maybe.

And remember, this is being done in the name of the Christian faith. I’m very familiar with the “faith-based” initiative, but faith-based bullying is something new entirely. I don’t claim to be a theologian, but I doubt Jesus would approve.

2 Responses to Religious right defends ‘faith-based’ harassment

jay September 5, 2012 - 9:46 am

It’s said that a stopped clock is right twice a day, and I must admit that I share some of their concerns (likely for different reasons.) It looks like we’re heading down the road of madness in the ‘speech codes’ for a few years ago. We already have laws governing harassment, targeting an individual in such a way as to interfere with their rights. But harassment law does not (and should not) cover more abstract expression of opinion. The exemption objected to is not just a religious thing but is (in proposed legislation I’ve seen) for ‘religious OR ethical’ reasons, and as such would indeed be constitutional. Of course we know that some of these folks are primarily motivated by the screwball religious angle, but, in a free society they’re allowed to do that. The problem is, that in many of these proposed laws, it’s the ‘victim’ that gets to choose what has offended or hurt them. I can guarantee you that strong ‘anti bullying’ laws WILL be used to suppress criticism of religion as hurtful and harmful. Another serious area of concern is the invoking teachers and others in monitoring students behavior in social media or other places OUTSIDE OF SCHOOL AND NOT ON SCHOOL TIME. What are we doing here? Why are we giving teachers and school officials authority and obligation to step, willy nilly into people’s private lives, conversations among friends, and other places where school officials have no damned business. Mandatory reporting of minor incidents is also an issue that can (and is in other contexts), but many times problems can be dealt with much more successfully in a quiet manner (the offended party is certainly should feel free to report without retribution if they feel the need). It’s a bad habit of our legal system that they feel the need to mandate collection of all sorts of stats on people, or things to throw at them later, but the most important thing should be dealing with the conflict, not filling some bureaucratic function). The most dangerous censors are those with good motives. Wendy Kaminer covers some of this much more elequently than I do: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/03/obama-administration-soft-on-bullying-hard-on-speech/72926/ http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/11/are-no-bullying-zones-constitutional/247867/

Charles September 8, 2012 - 1:44 pm

Targeting an individual to harass is not the same as making critical statements in general. A student should be allowed to express his dislike of homosexuals, but should not be using such comments to target and threaten any individuals. The same goes for religious children. The kid is fine saying “I’m a Christian” and praying to whatever deity he wishes, but when he targets an individual and attempts to proselytize after being asked to stop, I would label that as harassment also. You should have the right to express any belief you wish as long as you don’t accost and harass those who express the wish to be left in peace. Being harassed is not the same as being offended. Offense is an emotional reaction, harassment is an act done knowingly by one person to another. It can include: obstructing someone’s path, coming into within a foot or two of their personal space and shouting or acting threateningly, verbal threatening (both hinting and direct), incitement for others to harass or abuse the target, non-consensual touching, and refusal to respect a person’s wish to be left alone. Criticism against religion is the same. As long as your comments against religion aren’t harassment, you should be allowed to express them. In other words there’s a difference between: “Homosexuality is wrong.” (One shouldn’t have to supplement any statement with “I believe that” because it should be obvious that a person believes their own statements unless they are knowingly telling a lie.) and “Billy is gay; he’s wrong.” This is an attack on Billy, which has no place in a school environment. This is the beginning of harassment. One could also say: “Religion is false.” but to say “Jennifer is religious; she’s stupid.” This is the beginning of harassment. There is no reason to make an example of Jennifer or Billy when expressing these beliefs other than to draw negative attention to them. Also any threats made toward homosexuals or the religious in the aforementioned examples that doesn’t mention the names of the children are not necessarily harassment but hate speech and could have the same effect as incitement to harassment to any students known to be members of the hated group. I’m something of a free speech absolutist, and I’m against most anti hate speech legislation, but I think some forms can be classified as incitement to violence and should be considered as such.

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Religious right defends ‘faith-based’ harassment

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