Tippecanoe School Corporation just exonerated Klondike Middle School’s handling of bullying claims where a girl ended up a suicide.
Generally speaking, grieving mothers of middle-schoolers who commit suicide hold high trump when they accuse a school of not doing enough about bullying. A lawyer or administrator with a poker face does not help in the media blame game. It does not help, either, that school corporations can’t tell all they know about the case to defend themselves against the media attention given the mother. (They probably could “tell all” should there be a lawsuit.)
But Friday night’s local TV news on the story was extraordinary: a grieving Principal got a lot of camera time as the School Corporation’s “face” in discussing the exoneration. She was not faking it.
There are no ties in poker, but I think Tippecanoe School Corporation may have trumped high trump.
Interesting front page news story juxtaposition in Saturday’s local paper.
- Indiana Right to Life expresses satisfaction with Senate Bill 371, which applies to institutional dispensers of chemical abortion pills many of the precautions previously applied to surgical abortion facilities. (An argument against the Bill was “why not apply those rules to doctors who dispense chemical abortion pills?” I assume IRTL has some sort of answer to that.)
- A federal judge overruled HHS Secretary Kathryn Sebelius, the one time she actually did something morally right, and ordered that the morning after pill be authorized for sale over-the-counter without age restriction.
I don’t claim these “cases” are irreconcilable. SB371 targets a pill for someone who is known to be a number of weeks into gestation of an infant, and is a much bigger technical medical deal than the morning after pill, which is for someone who had “unprotected sex” within the last X hours and might later discover pregnancy if this fairly routine and uncomplicated “precaution” isn’t taken.
For whatever it’s worth, I have little confidence that the clearing of the morning after pill for over-the-counter sale – not by the judge, but by the bureaucrats who assess safety and efficacy and who recommend that it be so sold – was untainted by the “abortion distortion factor:” that every rule must bend when the weight of abortion policy is brought to bear on it. Maybe the morning after pill is safe de facto; it’s definitely “safe” de jure. Sleep well, moms and dads.
Be that all as it may, do note this, which may be no concern of the Food and Drug Administration, but ought to concern the rest of us: over-the-counter sale of the morning after pill, without age restriction, will make it even easier for perverts who impregnate underage girls to avoid detection. Disallowing sale without prescription, or disallowing sale to girls under the age of consent (or to men) without prescription, maintains a gatekeeper function for professionals who might ask relevant questions like “how old is the boy you had sex with?”
Finally, in all this, let not my scruplously neutral discussion be taken for insouciance. I increasingly detest living in a culture where it’s socially obligatory to treat fornication as perfectly fine so long as everyone is a consenting adult. Can’t we at least resurrect some stigmatizing epithets for fornicators, like “Lothario” or (with a sneer) “fun date” or “good time that was had by all”? Or is stigma forever and always forbidden now?
Whole Foods Market, while proclaiming their support for organics and “seed purity,” gave the green light to USDA bureaucrats to approve the “conditional deregulation” of Monsanto’s genetically engineered, herbicide-resistant alfalfa. Beyond the regulatory euphemism of “conditional deregulation,” this means that WFM and their colleagues are willing to go along with the massive planting of a chemical and energy-intensive GE perennial crop, alfalfa; guaranteed to spread its mutant genes and seeds across the nation; guaranteed to contaminate the alfalfa fed to organic animals; guaranteed to lead to massive poisoning of farm workers and destruction of the essential soil food web by the toxic herbicide, Roundup; and guaranteed to produce Roundup-resistant superweeds that will require even more deadly herbicides such as 2,4 D to be sprayed on millions of acres of alfalfa across the U.S.
Other than that, it was pretty much business as usual. I wonder if Monsaton will sue the adjoining farmers whose alfalfa involuntarily crosses with Monsaton’s “Alfalfa®”?
Oh, I forgot. It’s all about feeding the world. Yeah. Right.
Of the Gospel story of the woman taken in adultery:
Christ comes into the scene and does not begin by giving the woman a lecture on why adultery is sinful. He begins by giving her accusers a taste of their own medicine. In a very beautiful gloss on this passage it is explained that when Christ bends down to write in the dirt – a very mysterious action – what He writes are the mortal sins of the men who stand ready to stone the adulteress. These men lower their stones and go away leaving her unmolested, because each of them has seen his own guilt and knows that he too is condemned to death under the Law. I think it’s safe to assume that Christ writes in the mud in order to avoid causing scandal or damage to the individual reputations of those gathered at the stoning. He respects their privacy and so simply makes a list of sins and allows each one to quietly and privately accept his guilt in the silence of his own heart.
Christ then says “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” The mob disbands and the woman is left with no one to accuse her. This is tremendously important: Christ has first shown the woman that her sin is not greater than the sins of other men, that she is a normal human being, and that God’s mercy is real and abundant. We can imagine the gratitude that she must have felt, realizing that there was no one left to condemn her and that she wasn’t going to die for her transgressions. It is here, at this moment when she has received the mercy of God as an emotional reality that He says to her “Sin no more.”
Okay, so this means that if we stand up and defend people against those who would accuse them and condemn them it gives us the right to make demands on them, right? No. When Christ says “Go and sin no more,” He is not saying “Quid pro quo.” He’s offering her a further gift: the gift of chastity ….
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 