Who's Going to Save the Nerds?

The anti-bullying hysteria coming from Washington is getting louder and sillier. Yesterday I had the story of how the government thinks teachers should monitor your kid's Facebook account to watch for bullying messages, and now this:

While the Department of Education continues its crackdown on mean-spirited taunting on Facebook, some members of Congress are joining the fight in Washington’s War on Bullying with a new bill aimed directly at kids who target students with disabilities.

Rep. Jackie Speier, California Democrat, will introduce a bill that would require schools to report incidents of bullying against children diagnosed with conditions like Down syndrome and Aspergers to the federal government. It would also mandate that any federal dollars that promote anti-bullying programs focus partially on that group.

“There is [currently] no requirement that as part of the anti-bullying curriculum, that there be made specific reference to children with special needs. That’s particularly dumb,” Speier said during a briefing on school bullying on Capitol Hill Wednesday. “What I want to do is create an environment where there is zero tolerance. I think that starts first with education and awareness. Then, when behavior is egregious, then people have to be called out on that.”

Speier’s initiative is part of a larger, national campaign to get the federal government, local officials and school districts to discourage incidents of name calling and taunting on school campuses and online.

President Obama even launched an anti-bullying initiative from the White House last year.

“We’ve got to dispel this myth that bullying is just a normal rite of passage,” Obama said in October.

“We here in Congress have a responsibility to act as well,” Speier said Wednesday.

But highlighting one group could put local schools working to curb the practice in a tough place, warned Neal McCluskey, associate director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the libertarian Cato Institute.

According to McCluskey, singling out specific groups for special consideration could occur at the expense of other victims not on a list of protected students.

“The federal government does have legitimate role to play in ensuring that schools do not allow systematic discrimination to occur in schools and certainly perpetrated by schools,” McCluskey said. “The problem starts when the federal government identifies specific groups that are somehow going to be more protected or identified for protection to the exclusion of other groups. So the person who’s just a ‘nerd’ doesn’t get the same level of protection because ‘nerds’ are not identified as a specific group in federal legislation.”

This is essentially Affirmative Action for bullying, identifying one group as protected while leaving other less politically correct groups on their own.  Nobody thinks bullying is a good thing (except for Democrat union thugs who regularly use that tactic against their opposition), but passing laws like this won't stop it.  Our schools will not be safer because of it, no kid will have less to fear...nothing.  It's meaningless, only good for generating feel-good headlines.

Hey Congress, how about you start doing something about the important stuff?

And if you really want to do something about bullies, the example of the Australian kid seemed to work pretty well.  Pick the bully up, hold him over your head, and then body slam him onto the concrete.  Quick and effective.