See posts Alarmism and Propaganda Have No Place in the Pro-Life Movement and Alarmism & Propaganda in the Prolife Movement Revisited to refresh your memory.

In this case, I got it totally wrong! I should have known to trust Life Issues.

Now I have heard from Peggy Hamill of Pro-Life Wisconsin, someone I have come to trust a lot, has had personal experience with where this memo has led. Pro-Life Wisconsin and its members were listed in a “thread assessment” for peacefully protesting at abortion clinics. Records of this threat assessment still exist at the local police department (thought the Department of Homeland Security has destroyed their copies).

Though they have back-pedaled, authorities took the step of listing peaceful demonstrations that are protected by First Amendment free speech and assembly rights as threats. What I thought was an over-reaction has proven to be a real threat to liberty.

Let me reiterate that I still hold to the title of my original post, “Alarmism and Propaganda Have No Place in the Pro-Life Movement.” I write such posts not to water down the prolife message, but to try to sharpen it. I truly believe that alarmism and propaganda do nothing but weaken the potency of the truth about abortion (not that my little blog with its small audience really has the power to do either). However, I now need to balance that statement with a warning about due vigilance.

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There is little doubt that bullying is a real problem in our public and private schools. However, to accept that there is a real problem is not to accept the proposed solution. According to the editors of our local newspaper, the solution includes a state law against bullying. Wisconsin is apparently only one of 14 states that has not already passed one. A state law against bullying would

. . .give every child in the state the same protection against intimidation and establish a procedure for complaints to be filed and cases investigated.

It also would mean that bullying outside of the school setting would be banned.

A state law against bullying seems so reasonable. I have to ask, though, why is a state law against bullying necessary? While a state law would give authorities leverage to investigate cases of bullying, I doubt that it would actually do much to protect children against intimidation. A law will definitely not teach a child to become lovers of peace and justice rather than tyrants. The only thing a law will do is provide a penalty for those who are caught – after they have already become bullies. Such penalties do little to actually stop negative behavior.

The very fact that a state law against bullying seems reasonable to us shows the failure of our society to embrace the family as the first school of love. Our culture has grown dependent on social institutions, form daycare to the school system, to raise our children for us. A school system does not have the power of a family to teach our children virtue.

Our social systems are doing their best to address the problem

In recent years, school districts across Wisconsin have adopted policies against bullying and many have backed this up with in-service programs for teachers and programs in the classrooms.

We applaud all of these efforts to put an end to something that can have both a serious and damaging impact on children.

In addition, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has developed “Bullying Prevention Curriculum” guides that have been sent to all school districts.

The guides contain instructional units targeted to students in grades three to five and six to eight. The guides also include bullying prevention policy guidelines that describe elements schools and districts should consider in developing a policy related to the prevention of and response to bullying behaviors.

That’s a pretty standard school system response to negative student behavior – policies, inservices and curricula. Such interventions do not compare to the power of a family’s daily personal interaction with the individual child.

The problem of bullying will not be completely solved this side of the Kingdom. It is a result of our sinful nature. However, our sinful nature can be overcome in each individual through the power of Divine Grace and by learning to cooperate with that grace to turn our hearts away from evil and toward authentic goodness. We learn to cooperate with grace – to live lives of faith and virtue – within and from our family.

A call for a state law against bullying is a sign of failure. It means that we have given up on forming lives of virtue and have resorted only to doling out penalties. I am not necessarily against such a law. It is possibly within the interest of public safety. On the other hand, we need to ask if it is an overreaching attempt to legislate morality that is best learned in the family. Our culture has come to see parenthood as a temporary interruption in “real life.” We expect parenting to be as little an inconvenience as possible. Falling for the allure of educational experts claiming to make our children more productive and successful if they can get them into school as early as possible, we have abrogated our responsibililty for raising our own children, expecting the State or the Church to do it for us. But social institutions that treat children in the plural are largely incapable of instilling virtue in the individual. The family is the school of love. The only real solution to bullying is to rethink the way we are raising and educating our children. The solution starts in the home.

End Note

“Anti-bullying law long overdue.” Marshfield News Herald 10 November 2008. Gannett Press. 6A.

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UK’s Largest Teachers’ Union Lobbies to Legalise Sex with Students

The story explains that the union sees an unfair discrimination in the law. The legal age of consent in the UK is 16. However, a teacher who has consensual sex with a student who is over the age of 16 is still charged for statutory rape. As a union representative pointed out, if that same teacher had consensual sex with a student from a different school, it would be legal.

Voices opposing the union warn of a slippery slope:

Gregory Carlin, however, a child protection activist and head of the Irish Anti-Trafficking Coalition, said that such ideas were another sign of the erosion of legal protections for young people against exploitation.

“If the NASUWT philosophy has its day,” he said, “exploiting a 16 year old in a brothel would carry no extra penalty.” Under the same logic, he said, “Jail guards would be able to take their pick from their charges and foster parents would be spared prosecution for having sex with foster children.”

People who warn of slippery slopes are often dismissed as alarmists. The slippery slope argument is really just a form of the “logical consequences” argument. While it is true that this sort of argument can be abused (such as the assertion that laws defining traditional marriage will logically lead to keeping post-menopausal women or couples with diagnosed fertility problems from getting married), they can be valid arguments if they are based on a real causal connection.

In this case, the valid connection is the purpose of the law. The prohibition of sex between teachers and students is designed to keep a teacher from using his or her authority (explicitly or implicitly) to influence a student into bed. The teacher’s union can argue that the law is not necessary due to entrenched professional expectations. It would be enough for the teacher to be fired – he or she does not also have to become a registered criminal. However, the law is in place not only for the teachers, but also for people in other positions of power. To change the law for one would change the law for all. This is a firm logical argument.

Taking one small step away from firm logical argument toward alarmism, one can look at the UK’s loosening of moral norms and see where it is all heading. The age of consent in the UK used to be 18. They lowered it to 16 but successfully resisted attempts to have it lowered t 14. Europe in general now sees saving sex for marriage as an antiquated and irrelevant value. Now attempts are being made to erase the legal penalty for a sex within a relationship of power. It may not be too large a step for the professional expectation to soon erode too. After all, it’s just sex, right? This line of argument does not have the backing of firm logic. It is a bit alarmist. However, it isn’t necessarily wrong. It is based on knowledge of our fallen human nature, and on observations of other ways our culture has grown accustomed to calling evil good (who would ever have thought in 1950 that we would accept killing unborn babies as a form of birth control?).

We must use slippery slope arguments with great care. They are perceived as alarmist and extremist. However, if they are carefully formulated they can be a powerful reasoning tool. Hopefully the UK will take note of such reasoning before they slip even further down the slippery slope of free sex.

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The most difficult issue our Catholic school deals with, without a doubt, is dress code. Dress code seems to anger teachers, parents, and students without prejudice. I recently gave a talk to a small group of parents and teachers defending out dress code. From the comments and looks of appreciation I received, I think I may have opened some minds a little bit, but I doubt I softened many hearts. My main point was that the dress code was an integral part of our Catholic school mission. It is a teaching tool that teaches self-respect, respect for others, and self-discipline. It is unfortunate that terms such as these tend to elicit the polite smiles that say, “how nice of you to still believe in such idealistic notions; some day you will grow up and come to reality.” It is the same smile given to most things Catholic in a Catholic school by many teachers and parents. I say that it is unfortunate because this smile reveals that so many people have given up on these ideals when these ideals have hardly moved beyond our reach! People have assumed that self-discipline is no longer possible, or at least no longer desirable, in today’s culture. We see this same attitude when dealing with other areas of discipline in schools. Shouldn’t we give teenagers contraception instead of expecting them to control their sexual desires? Isn’t it easier to label someone with a behavioral disorder or an “oppositional defiance disorder” rather than expecting him or her to control anger and obey authority? In addition, who can deny the anti-authority messages in our music, movies, and television programs? We have lost sight of a couple of the most important and rewarding moral principles that Catholic morality has to offer us. These principles deal with the joys of self-discipline and the purpose of authority.

What is self-discipline all about, anyway? Why would it be something for which it would be worth working? The main theme of Catholic morality is to become the kind of people who habitually choose that which can bring us true, eternal happiness. Only God can bring us true, eternal happiness. All created goods either fail to perfectly satisfy, or decompose due to their temporary nature. Only God is perfect and eternal. Furthermore, God is the creator of all other good things. When we possess God, we possess the perfect source of perfect happiness, and the source of all other sources of happiness. God wants us to enjoy created goods, but in a way that does not make us selfish or enable the created good to hold power over us. When a created good becomes too important to us, our free will becomes a slave to it. Therefore, we become less free. Being self-disciplined means being able to identify and attain the greatest good in every situation. It means making constant progress toward the eternal possession of God in love. Being self-disciplined means being truly free, never enslaved by obsession over a created good. Self-discipline brings true joy in this life and perfect happiness in the eternal life of heaven. However, such lofty benefits do not make self-discipline an impossible ideal. It is a virtue that we can help each other to attain. That’s where authority comes in.

Most people readily pair the word “authority” with the word “oppression.” Authority is seen in opposition to freedom. It surprises people if they ever learn that the Catholic Church (which is often also paired with the word “oppression”) pairs “authority” with “authentic freedom.” The Church teaches us that the primary purpose of authority is to teach us self-discipline. Laws, and the authority that legislates and enforces them, lead us to the greatest authentic good. Well-balanced laws serve to protect us against our fallen human nature without destroying our freedom. We must find a balance between too little authority, which fails to guide us to the greatest good when we need guidance, and too much authority, which destroys our freedom and makes true goodness impossible. What about those times we do not understand the purpose for a law? Both civic and religious authorities often propose laws that seem to make no sense to us. If the authority is a legitimate authority and the law does not contradict that moral law it was designed to protect, then we must follow even laws that we do not understand out of respect for and trust in the authority. We must acknowledge that we do not always know what is best. Authority often has more knowledge and a greater perspective than we do. Obedience to authority flies hand-in-hand with the virtue of humility. Humility is the virtue of accurately assessing your place, neither exaggerating it nor overestimating it. Humility helps us to trust authorities placed over us instead of foolishly asserting a false kind of freedom that comes out of pride. The ability to cooperate with authority as it guides us to the greater good leads us to true freedom by teaching us to overcome our fallen human nature and choose the greater good ourselves.

In recent history, authority has been vilified. It has been judged the enemy of freedom. Parents have been told not to discipline their children for fear of stifling their natural creative impulses. Teenagers are repeatedly told to rebel against authority for the same reasons. In fact, the main complaint against the dress code is that is stifles the students’ free expression. The truth is that the dress code shapes the students’ expression to help them express what is best and most noble about themselves. Its main goal is to help students express their inner beauty instead of focusing so much on their bodies, as modern fashion does. The same is true of all authority. We must teach our children, not only to respect and honor authority, but to value it. Of course, once we learn self-discipline, we no longer need authority to tell us how to attain the greatest good. That is freedom in every sense of the word.

Wild Willy is not to be apprehended alone. Leave him to the authorities.

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