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Thernstrom says:

“Those standards rest on a core conviction of the civil-rights community: In a nonracist society, minorities would be elected to political office in numbers proportional to the black and Hispanic populations.”

Yet a “nonracist society” is exactly what you cannot legislate. Nor is there any legitimacy to the notion of racial “proportionality” — and if there is, why bother with population-wide elections? Just hold intra-racial elections to set a proportional number of racial representatives. If blacks are 20 percent of a given population, let them elect 20 members of a 100-member legislature, and so on. Wasn’t that Lani Guinier’s idea? In function, it’s no different from what DOJ tries to do anyway, but by less alarming means.

Put up with school bullying? Never.
When such a thing happens to adults in university or office situations it can be amusing and minor, because the adult victim has the ultimate right to leave the scene if the boss won’t stop it. Children are denied this power; therefore they have the absolute right to have the law stop it for them.
If this does not happen, there will be more Columbines, and they will be justified.

No, “children” will eventually whack the bully. The bully goes and picks on some other child. There will be more columbines not because some kid was bullied, but rather because their are parents who don’t get in their kids face and find out what is going on in their lives. If the parents of the “children” who committed murder at columbine had been tossing the kids room, and physically being with the “child”, I venture to say, their would not be any columbine. So, the moral is, bullying is usually not a problem, but shot from the hip pop psych diagnosis is a problem.

JDG>…there will be more Columbines, and they will be justified.

Yikes. I’d feel a whole lot safer with Dr. Helene (learning how to cope with bullies “can be an important stage in childhood development”) Guldberg running my school than with anyone who thought mass murders could “be justified”.

John David Galt,

If this does not happen, there will be more Columbines, and they will be justified.

I’m sorry, but I am having problems following your thinking. Columbine was a case of bullying, not retaliation for being bullying. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were not being bullied, they were the bullies.

According to many sources, including this USA Today article, (t)he killings ignited a national debate over bullying, but the record now shows Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold hadn’t been bullied — in fact, they had bragged in diaries about picking on freshmen and “fags.”

The notion that Harris and Klebold were acting in retaliation for being bullied fits our narrative, but it does not fit the facts.

I am against “bullying,” but at the same time, kids (and adults) need to learn to deal with people that for whatever reason don’t like them. To have the law or police come running every time someone feels insulted or pushed around teaches the child that they are entitled to a life where they are universally loved, should never be insulted, and never learn to overcome adversity.

Don’t believe me? Go watch most any youth sport. There is a reason we have terms like “Little League parent” who feels their child must be protected from anything that goes wrong. The kid never learns to overcome a bad call, or even a good call that goes against them. It is always someone else’s fault.

Like everything in life, a balance between strife in a child’s life and being over-protective needs to be struck.

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