Savaged: Republicans Protect the Right to Bully in Michigan Schools (Thank The Good Lord)

By Chris Savage

On November 2, 2011, the Michigan Senate passed Senate Bill 137, a bill they called “Matt’s Safe Schools Law.” The bill, sponsored by Republican Rick Jones of Grand Ledge, passed on a 100 percent party line vote with no Democrats voting for it and no Republicans voting against it. The bill was named after a boy named Matt Epling who committed suicide in 2002 after being bullied by students at East Lansing High School. Aside from Michigan, only two other states lack statewide bans on bullying in schools.

The bill was immediately assailed from all sides as not only failing to be “anti-bullying,” but actually providing teachers, administrators and students a “license to bully.” The reason for this label lies in one sentence added to the bill immediately prior to the final vote:

“This section does not prohibit a statement of a sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction of a school employee, school volunteer, pupil, or a pupil & parent or guardian.”

House Senate Democrats describe it this way:

In less than 30 words, Republicans turned anti-bullying legislation into pro-bullying legislation. Essentially, instead of protecting Michigan’s students from harassment, it issues a license to bully. It tells our kids that when a bully screams hateful words on a daily basis at a student simply because they perceive them to be gay, that’s ok. It tells them that when prejudiced and even overtly racist slurs are shouted at a student simply because of who they are, that’s ok too.

This legislation doesn’t protect our students from bullying, it actually sanctions bullying in our school hallways and gives our students a blueprint on how to get away with it.

In a speech that has since gone viral with well over 150,000 views on YouTube, Senate Democratic Leader Gretchen Whitmer. delivered a blistering rebuke to her Republican colleagues.

You may be able to pat yourselves on the back today and say that you did something. But, in actuality, you’re explicitly outlining how to get away with bullying. Your exceptions have swallowed the rule. As passed today, bullying kids is okay if a student, parent our school employee can come up with a moral or religious reason for doing it. But bullying is not okay. We should be passing public policy that protects kids, ALL kids, from bullies — ALL bullies. But, instead, you’ve set us back farther, creating a blueprint for bullying.

So, this might solve a political problem that the Republicans have. But be clear: you are papering over the problem that is a reality faced by hundreds of kids in Michigan schools every day. In fact, not only does the NOT protect kids who are bullied, it further endangers them by legitimizing excuses for tormenting a student.

The saddest and sickest irony of this whole thing is that it’s called “Matt’s Safe School Law”. After the way you’ve gutted it, it wouldn’t have done a damn thing to save Matt. This worse than doing nothing. It’s a Republican license to bully. [Full transcript HERE.]

News outlets around the country began reporting on the bill in highly negative ways. The story was picked up by Time Magazine, the Washington Post and ABC News among others. State Superintendent of Schools Mike Flanagan issued a statement was direct and to the point:

“There should never be an excuse or reason or justification for anyone to bully, intimidate, or harass a student. I cannot imagine any real moral conviction or religious teaching that says it acceptable to inflict pain, humiliation, and suffering on another person, especially a child. The legislation, as passed by the Michigan Senate, is a disappointing development in a process that we have worked on so diligently together for the protection of all schoolchildren in Michigan. After my long relationship with families of children who have committed suicide after being bullied, I find this bill now to be a joke, especially as it is named in memory of one of those children.” [emphasis mine]

Matt Epling’s father, Kevin Epling, issued a statement read on the Senate floor saying, “I am ashamed that this could be Michigan’s bill on anti-bullying when in fact it is a ‘bullying is OK in Michigan law.'”

Two Ann Arbor-area students, Katy Butler and Carson Borbely, created a petition on the online petition website Change.org. Their petition is currently the most popular on the site and has picked up well over 500 signatures just in the hour or so that it has taken me to write this piece.

The bill was even skewered by Stephen Colbert on the Colbert Report as the focus of his “The Word” segment, where he said, in Michigan it’s okay to bully “as long as you have a permission slip from God”.

In response to the clearly-unanticipated hue & cry from around the country, House Republicans immediately began signaling that they would “fix” the bill. Two days after the bill passed, MIRS news service posted an article titled “Potvin: My Bullying Bill Won’t Include Religious Exemption”. By Monday of this week, articles appeared in various newspapers, like the one in the Detroit Free Press titled “House GOP leaders seek compromise in controversial anti-bullying legislation”.

On Thursday of this week, the House stepped up to save the Senate Republicans from their self-inflicted debacle and passed House Bill 4163 sponsored by Republican Rep. Philip Potvin of Cadillac.

This bill passed with bipartisan support with 88 votes in favor. 18 Republicans still couldn’t find their way to vote for it, however. When I spoke to Ann Arbor-area Democratic State Representative Jeff Irwin on the House floor yesterday afternoon, he told me that Republicans were still trying to insert language into the bill, placing “substantial” in front of a number of descriptions of bullying’s impacts and refusing to enumerate any specific classes of protected students (for example, students who are handicapped, minorities or non-heterosexual.) And, in fact, the final bill does contain this limiting adjective. Bullying in this bill is defined as:

“[A]ny written, verbal, or physical act, or any electronic communication, that is intended or that a reasonable person would know is likely to harm 1 or more pupils either directly or indirectly by doing any of the following:

• Substantially interfering with educational opportunities, benefits, or programs of 1 or more pupils.
• Adversely affecting the ability of a pupil to participate in or benefit from the school district’s or public school’s educational programs or activities by placing the pupil in reasonable fear of physical harm or by causing substantial emotional distress.
• Having an actual and substantial detrimental effect on a pupil’s physical or mental health.
• Causing substantial disruption in, or substantial interference with, the orderly operation of the school.

One of those who voted against it was David Agema of Grandville. Agema was so much in support of the original Senate bill that he was prepared to debate Gretchen Whitmer on it on Anderson Cooper’s CNN show last week. Their debate was, however, preempted by news of Joe Paterno’s firing.

While considering the House bill imperfect, Michigan Democratic legislators are generally satisfied that it is a dramatic improvement over the Senate version. However, in order for the bill to be made into law, the Senate needs pass it as well, and that is unlikely to happen anytime soon as they are on a two-week vacation for deer hunting season starting Monday. Once again, Gretchen Whitmer read them the riot act:

So, it looks like the House of Representatives is poised to pass their own bill that is about anti-bullying today. One that actually protects our students unlike the one you passed last week. It’s inexcusable to suggest to our students that you can’t work one day next week to pass a bill and send it to the Governor as quickly as possible on an issue as important as our kids’ safety. I’ll be ready to come into this chamber next week and go to work. Our students will be in class. Our workers will be at work. Our seniors and families, they’re all going to wonder what’s truly important to you if you’re not ready to do the same. [Full transcript HERE.]

The change in this bill when it went from the Senate to the House caught my attention. For the past year, Democrats have been essentially without power in our state. They control the Governor’s & Lt. Governor’s offices, the Attorney General’s office, the State Supreme Court and, of course, both houses of the Legislature. How, then, could they have forced such capitulation on the Republicans? And make no mistake: this is a capitulation. The language in the original bill was clearly put there to allow those who push others around using religious reasons a pass to continue to do so. Gary Glenn, president of the American Family Association of Michigan has long decried anti-bullying laws that spell out specific classes of protected individuals as “a Trojan horse for the homosexual agenda.”

So, how did the Democrats managed to win a fight when they essentially have no power? And what can Democratic lawmakers and activists in Michigan learn from this?

I spoke with Whitmer not long after she gave her fiery admonition yesterday to ask her these questions. She told me that the biggest lesson that this has taught is that, despite setbacks, “Democrats can still make forward motion. If they pay attention and weigh in on issues, they can change things,” she told me.

She described the Senate’s version of the bill using phrases like “ludicrous”, “indefensible” and “huge overreach”. Because they went too far, she said, “Speaker [Jase] Bolger saw the backlash. He realized that this legislation was so offensive that they had to change.”

The thing that made the difference this time, she said, was social media. “The video of my speech went totally viral,” she said. It was being reposted all over Facebook and retweeted on Twitter. It was everywhere and that’s when it made the national news. It’s an issue that struck a chord.”

Talking about the revamped bill, Whitmer said that it’s definitely an improvement but that it still fails to spell out protected classes of kids. She then pointed out the hypocrisy of her Republican colleagues. “Today we passed a bill in the Senate that says the Pledge of Allegiance must be said in our schools every day. But, if a kid doesn’t want to participate, they don’t have to. They put a clause in the bill that says those kids can’t be bullied. So they were willing to put in a specific group of protected kids into that bill but not in their anti-bullying bill!”

I also posed these questions to Democratic Rep. Jeff Irwin. He said that, despite their dramatic minority status, this is familiar territory for Democrats. “It’s not much different than usual,” he said. They have money on their side. What we have is that we’re right on the issues.” He went to say, “Republicans have the ‘Money Truck’ that they back up into their districts during elections.” But being right on the issues can win elections just like we saw on Tuesday [with the recall of Republican Paul Scott of Grand Blanc.]”

“The Republicans get themselves into trouble when they do something so patently absurd as this anti-bullying bill. We have been working on this type of legislation for years and this bill made a mockery of it. It was overreach and now they are trying to get another bill into the public discourse to get the Senate’s feet out of the fire.

Irwin says there are two components to winning in politics. The first is what he refers to as the “inside game” or the legislative victories. For the inside game, he said, “You need to build relationships. There are times when one-on-one conversations with people on the other side of the aisle can change minds.” When I asked what Democratic activists can do in this time of minority status, he said citizen contact is critical. “Getting a lot of calls on an issue can make a big difference,” he said. “We listen to that. The fight over No-Fault insurance that is happening right now is a good example of that. Most of the Republicans were ready to pass the bill [to remove the requirement for lifetime health benefits in auto insurance policies.] But they got so many calls from constituents saying, ‘Hey, we like it the way it is’ that now a lot of them are running away from it as fast as they can.”

The second part of winning is what Irwin calls “the outside game” or winning elections. What’s critical for Democrats here, he says, is that they actually act like Democrats. Too many Democrats across the country are trying to lay low, take middle-of-the-road positions and try not to offend anyone so that they can be reelected. “What people want to see is them being real progressives,” he said. “They need to walk the walk, not just talk the talk, and tell folks what they’re really about.” If they do that, he said, “it will get people fired up and active at election time.

At a time when Democrats in Michigan are virtually powerless, it is essential that they find new ways to stay relevant and to make sure that the views of their constituents are heard and represented in Lansing. The dramatic overreach by House and Senate Republicans is giving them an opportunity to use creative ways of doing that. By standing up as true progressives to speak out on behalf of significant number of Michiganders not represented by the right-wing agenda being executed in the Legislature, and using social media to help spread that message, they are able to have an impact. They are using this newfound voice to their advantage, too. Go to the Senate Dems’ website and the splash page is all about the Senate’s “anti”-bullying bill. It even gives you an opportunity to “tell your story” (and, of course, give them your contact information.)

What remains to be seen is whether or not they can sustain this. It is contingent upon their base to stay fired up over the next year through the 2012 election. If Rep. Irwin is right, and I believe he is, we’re going to see a lot more Democratic pushback between now and then.

Get out the popcorn.

For more of Chris Savage’s writing, visit Eclectablog.