The anti-bullying campaign was supposed to be one of those causes that everyone, regardless of ideology or political party, was able to get behind. As Emily Bazelon discovered in her seminal book on bullying in schools, Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy, even in schools where it seems fairly obvious that authorities were being negligent toward victims of bullying, the schools insisted that they were opposed to bullying. No one is for bullying, right?Seriously.
Well, that’s what we’d like to believe. But it seems that, as with many things, bullying is becoming a partisan issue. Anti-bullying efforts seem liberal in tone and emphasis, which means that they will inevitably attract negative attention from the knee-jerk “anything to piss off the liberals” crowd. But let’s be honest: Part of the reason conservatives frequently support bullying—or at least resist efforts to end it—is because bullying works. Bullies are good at exerting exactly the kind of social control that the right, especially the Christian right, wants to exert. So here’s a list of incidences where conservatives just straight-up supported bullying in the face of efforts to curb it.
Every "freedom" that they insist upon violates the old adage, "Your freedom ends where my nose begins."
They want the right to discriminate, and to act on their hatred and their bigotry.
You have the right to be a bigot and a hater, but you cannot inflict your bigotry and hatred on the rest of society.
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