Amanda Marcotte is just a little surprised to find Fox News pundits saying “You can’t legislate behavior.” Huh, yeah, I’m surprised by that too. You can’t legislate behavior? So there are no laws against murder, theft, assault, fraud, rape, kidnapping, extortion? Or are we to understand that murder, theft, assault, fraud, rape, kidnapping, extortion are something other than behavior?
And whatever happened to the old law&order brand of conservatism? Did it get washed away in the flood of tea, or what?
Anyone who has ever subjected herself to right-wing talk radio or Bill O’Reilly’s show knows that conservatives have an affinity for a good, old-fashioned bully. Even so, it was a bit surprising to see Shannon Bream on Fox News host a segment worrying that anti-bullying rules at schools violate “free speech.” Bream was deeply concerned that homophobes and anti-choicers wouldn’t be able to express their “political views” at school.
Maybe Bream really does think that people of her political persuasion really can’t make their case without bullying. That would be a bit…incriminating.
“But we see in some of these cases in some of these schools that kids who want to put on pro-life displays, who are pro-Second Amendment, those kinds of things, things that are viewed as a more conservative viewpoint, in some cases the bullying stuff is being used against them so they can’t speak their positions,” Bream argued, declining to offer any examples. Does “speak their positions” mean arguing for an abortion ban in debate class, or is it more a situation where kids are “speaking their positions” by targeting individual students for harassment because they believe those kids are gay? I guess we’ll just have to assume the worst!
Exactly. Bream herself said it! It wasn’t those pesky liberals!
“You can’t legislate behavior,” David Webb, Fox News contributor, said, causing one to wonder when it was that conservatives decided that having school rules is fascism, man. Where was Webb when kids needed him after getting detention for cutting class or speaking out of turn?
He actually said that. Well at least there’s no law against laughing at Fox News contributors.