Bullying: A Pseudo-crisis of Convenience

According to the late “humanist” sex-educator, Dr. Sol Gordon, “The traditional family, with all its supposed attributes, enslaved woman; it reduced her to a breeder and caretaker of children, a servant to her spouse, a cleaning lady, and at times a victim of the labor market as well.”

Inspired by the supposed injustice of it all, self-righteous liberal elites and their malleable minions (composed largely of irreligious malcontents in search of a cause) are actively engaged in what may best be described as a battle against gender-specificity; most especially as it relates to suppressing maleness and the damnable characteristics common to those whom they hold in contempt for subjugating generations of innocent women to lives of homemaking and motherhood.

Emboldened by their misguided convictions, liberal social engineers are hell bent and determined to see to it that society doesn’t allow a healthy sense of maleness (e.g., attributes like competitiveness, protectiveness and leadership) to take hold in the next generation of husbands and fathers; ergo their deliberate effort to discourage the development of authentic masculinity in male children from boyhood to adolescence.

If we’re honest, we must admit that they have enjoyed no small measure of success.

With K-thru-12 schoolyards from sea-to-shining-sea boasting a bumper crop of soft-bellied boys who have been raised to believe that every incident of normal youthful conflict is best resolved by mommy in a parent-teacher meeting, the time was apparently ripe for launching a corresponding ersatz crisis; namely, that dreaded social epidemic known as “bullying.”

This relatively recent brainchild of leftwing propagandists threatens to rival the climate change hoax in terms of creativity, but that’s not the only thing these causes celeb have in common.

Both of them began with an age-old, well known fact of life (the climate is in flux / kids are often cruel) and then cloaked it in alarmist language (“the world is about to end” / “thousands of gay adolescents are facing death”) so it could be broadcast to the world by a liberal media eager to hype the latest pending catastrophe that, go figure, will only be abated when the broader society embraces the drastic measures prescribed by those who invented the fiction in the first place (immediate conversion to “green” everything / wholesale endorsement of the gay lifestyle.)

In addition to this, both the climate change and anti-bullying initiatives include a program of indoctrination designed to groom school children for future activism while, as an added bonus, equipping kids with the pseudo-science necessary to challenge any parent who dares cling to their backwards ways (“incandescent light bulbs are melting the polar icecaps” / “the gay lifestyle is absolutely normal.”)

By way of contrast, it seems that at least some of the captains of the anti-bullying industry, unlike their green counterparts, are no longer even bothering to pretend that their cause is anything other than the stealth nefarious liberalism that it is; in the present case, a marketing campaign designed to promote homosexual behavior among adolescents.

If nothing else, homosexual activist Dan Savage — who recently made news by bullying an assembly of high school students — deserves credit for being plainspoken about the fact that the anti-bullying campaign is actually a triumvirate of causes such that together with visceral hatred for Christianity and lockstep allegiance to the gay agenda they are but three men in one and the same tub — no pun intended.

Fr. Robert Barron recently addressed the topic of bullying in an article posted on the Word-on-Fire website saying, “Our culture has largely forgotten the subtle art of transforming boys into men.”

“Whether we are talking about the Navajo, Masai warriors, or Orthodox Jews, traditional cultures understand that boys have to be brought through a period of trial — some test of skill and endurance — during which they learn the virtues of courage and self-sacrifice,” Fr. Barron wrote.

“One reason why boys turn into bullies,” he theorized, “is that they have no one around to turn them into men.”

I agree wholeheartedly, but there are other sides to this coin that merit discussion as well.

Let’s begin by acknowledging that immature people of all ages have been picking on their weaker counterparts for as long as kids have been eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Is this a good thing? Of course not, but let’s stop pretending that something new is afoot. It’s not.

That’s not to say that nothing new is taking place, however.

To the extent that incidents of bullying are on the rise in general, and against “gay” kids in particular, (if, in fact, that’s really even the case at all) we can thank the same liberal social engineers who now claim to possess unparalleled insight into the solution.

It was, after all, the enlightened minds of the gender-nonconformity / anti-masculinity movement who sold feckless parents and educators on the unnatural ideas that created today’s victim class of weak-kneed boys who are ill-equipped at defending themselves and lack the wherewithal to come to the aid of a weaker counterpart; the way boys used to react to bullying.

With this being the case, would anyone in their right mind be surprised to discover that there has also been an increase in the number of adolescents (especially male) who are struggling to develop a healthy degree of sexual maturity, some of them even wondering if they’re homosexual?

As the Savages of the world would have us believe, a large percentage of human beings have always been “born gay,” but it is only thanks to the good efforts of people in the LGBT community that increasingly more of these kids are now able to come out of the closet.

Nonsense. The LGBT community has done nothing but yeoman’s work inmaking sure that sexually under-developed, confused adolescents who are wrestling with unnatural, disordered desires exist in spades. From there, these champions of justice do everything they can to make sure that these unfortunate children are summarily deprived of the help they really need, because God forbid anyone acknowledge the underlying psychological and spiritual maladies that accompany homosexuality.

The reality is that people like Dan Savage and his “husband” are simply using these poor kids to further their own self-satisfying agenda.

When a depressed and suffering adolescent who is grasping for sexual maturity comes forward, the best they can offer is a meaningless bumper sticker slogan, “It gets better,” accompanied, of course, by heartfelt encouragement to embrace every “gay” inclination that ever crosses their troubled young minds no matter how fleeting. Then, when things don’t just magically improve and one of the more broken of these poor souls commits suicide, the leftwing propagandists can’t exploit the tragedy fast enough, blaming everyone from conservative politicians to Jesus Christ Himself, but never themselves.

The anti-bullying hucksters are essentially asking us to believe that perfectly normal, psychologically healthy, adolescents who are experiencing entirely natural homosexual inclinations are being pushed to the brink of suicide entirely by outside forces; namely, bullies.

Seriously? Does anyone remember Columbine? The two perpetrators of the 1999 massacre at a Colorado high school were misfit victims of bullying who, in addition to killing and wounding dozens of others, ultimately took their own lives as well. Interestingly, the liberal left did in fact voice concerns about the role that bullying may have played in the tragedy, though it was largely drowned out by the hue and cry over gun control.

No one, however, was dopey enough to maintain that the two teen murderers turned suicide victims were otherwise psychologically healthy adolescents who were pushed to act by a bunch of meanies. When the FBI’s lead investigator and several psychiatrists ultimately concluded that the two teenaged gunmen were suffering with psychopathy and depression was anyone really surprised?

No, of course not, because it is pretty well understood that people who take their own lives are always suffering some substantial degree of psychological illness; it’s never just the work of a bully, an ex-wife, or a mean boss. Sure, outside influences may serve to act as a catalyst, but mentally healthy people are never just a few bullies away from taking their own lives. Only a willing fool believes otherwise.

In order for the bullying controversy to be all that the left claims it is, we also need to believe that those in charge of our schools are part of the problem and need to do more to prevent it. Right… because everyone knows that the overwhelming majority of the nation’s school teachers and principals are gun toting, right wing homophobes who are disinterested in the liberal agenda!

At the end of the day, innocent people — both hoodwinked parents and innocent children — are suffering while modern day gender-bending leftists congratulate themselves for being sufficiently enlightened of mind to recognize the next necessary step in the culture’s evolution. Truth be told, they give themselves far too much credit.

In reality, they are really little more than expendable pawns in the hands of a being far more cunning than they can even imagine; useful idiots deployed by an evil mastermind with reckless abandon into the thick of a life and death battle that began all the way back on day one.

Well, make that shortly after day seven; the topic of next week’s column.

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Louie Verrecchio is a Catholic speaker and the author of Harvesting the Fruit of Vatican II; an internationally acclaimed adult faith formation tool, endorsed by George Cardinal Pell, that explores the documents of the Second Vatican Council. For more information please visit: www.harvestingthefruit.com. You can follow him on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/louie.verrecchio.

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