The Cases Of Dynasty And Ja'Maya: Fending Off Bullies Can Get You Expelled ... Or Charged With A Felony

And yes, it's an ironic name for the high school.

INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. — An independent arbitrator ruled Monday that an Indiana gay teen will remain expelled from Arsenal Tech High School in Indianapolis until January 7, 2013 for discharging a stun gun on school property to discourage an attack by bullies.

17-year-old Darnell "Dynasty" Young was bullied for a long time at his high school. So long, in fact, that his mother gave him a stun gun for protection. He carried it in his backpack for weeks without even ervealing that he had possession of such a defense device. Then on April 16, he was approached by six young men in between class buildings who threatened to beat him up. He then pulled out the stun gun and fired it in the air to ward them off.

For that act of self-defense, Dynasty is not able to finish his junior year, nor the entire first semester of his senior year.*

There will be a rally for Dynasty on May 15 during the meeting of the school board.

Interviews with Dynasty and his mother, Chelisa Grimes, revealed several additional points about the bullying: it involved rumors about having sex with certain teachers and it also brought up the question "How far does this go?" Another point: will schools ever come up with rules as to the extent a teen can respond to bullying if he or she feels his life is threatened?

"Weapon" versus "Firearm"

The concealed carrying of a stun gun is legal in 43 states since tasers are not considered firearms by the U.S. Government. Carrying a stun gun to school, therefore, carries the same weight as carrying a knife, so would Dynasty's penalty have been as severe if he had wielded a knife?

The Case of Ja'Maya in BULLY

The movie BULLY may be one of the most powerful presentations on the subject because it focuses on the bullied teens, their families and the families of teens whose suicides were the results of relentless bullying. 13 million kids are bullied each year and many parents simply do not feel that their kids are safe. As in the case with Chelisa Grimes, she thought giving her son a taser would help him fend off the bullies. But in the case of BULLY's Ja'Maya (no last name given), the victim took matters into her own hands by brandishing a gun against her attackers on a school bus. Her mother had no idea that she had possession of the gun. As a result of the incident, however, Ja'Maya faced over 40 FELONY CHARGES. She was eventually put on probation instead of being placed in jail.

Dynasty, Ja'Maya and BULLY have a common thread: both parents and kids feel powerless against bullies because school systems have refused to take a pro-active stance against the "kids-will-be-kids-they're-cruel-at-this age" meme. To what point do they take matters into their own hands? Should they be armed in any way?

Has it come to this:

The Knuckle-Blaster (pictured above)

You wear this 950000 volt stun gun on your knuckles like a knuckle cap and punch your aggressor with a powerful blast of electric shock to incapacitate him and if you hold the device to your aggressor’s body for a longer period, he may fall down on the ground in pain and contortion.

A deadly serious discussion is needed. NOW.



*To date, there has been no action against the teens who surrounded Dynasty that day. Maybe they cited religious grounds.

I Agree With Dan Savage

So President Obama has finally EVOLVED. There's still a long, long way to go. And here's what the Right will make of it:

Uh, Is That John Revolta?

"Hollywood is controlled by homosexual Jewish men who expect favors in return for sexual activity."
It was divulged yesterday that Johnn Travolta is being sued by his masseur for homosexual advances. Oh Boy!

Oh, how the mighty tits have fallen!

Lest We Forget: Vain Hubris Can Be Disastrous - The Hindenburg Showed Us How.

American exceptionalism has been in the news so much lately that you'd think it was an inbred trait of America.


It is. Only it was called by other names in the past: "Manifest Destiny" and "American Colonialism." The concept of America as the Number One nation in the world, it seems has always been with us, but there have been times when our swelled heads have been deflated - pride going before the fall, so to speak.


Yesterday was the 75th anniversary of the Hindenburg disaster, an epic tragedy in many ways to many people, but perhaps the biggest setback to a prideful National Socialist Party and its homeland, Germany.


It was May, 1937, and Germany was still riding a high from 1936 - hosting the Summer Olympics and re-occupying the Rhineland (against the Treaty of Versailles) in its first real aggressive act since WWI. True, it was fighting some bad vibes from other countries (especially the U.S. and even the Vatican), but it also saw the unifying of Germany and Japan against Communist Russia in the Anti-Comintern Pact. Germany as a power in the air had been established for a long while, with the flying of zeppelins as proof of Germany's technological superiority.


There was hubris tinged with irony in the disaster: it was first proposed that the massive zeppelins be filled with helium, a non-flammable substance, but because America - the biggest producer of helium gas during the 20s and 30s - had a military embargo against Germany banning the import of helium, Germany was forced to use flammable hydrogen as the primary lift gas for zeppelins. For years, the zeppelins filled with hydrogen had operated without a problem, giving Germany the feeling that it had mastered the art of lighter-than-air flying. The Hindenburg was, in a sense, the Titanic of zeppelins, drawing onlookers wherever it went - and especially where it landed. It had, in fact, flown 34 successful transatlantic trips in 1936.


The film of the disaster will remain in history's memory forever: not until 9/11 had anyone ever seen instant flaming destruction on such a scale.


Not until 9/11 - perhaps the other wake up call to a nation's hubris. Yes, it may seem a stretch to compare the two, but bear with this concept: whether natural or man-made, disasters can bring countries of great import to to their knees. More than humbling, disasters can be a reality check, a jolt back into perspective. The problem with that jolt, however, is how we react to it: if we react with more hubris (the cowboy diplomacy of George Bush?), we may be worse off than before.

American exceptionalism, as said before, has always been with us. We are the shining City On a Hill "exempt from historical forces that have affected other countries." (wikipedia). "Exempt" may too mild a word for a country that has considered a capitalist, boot-straps, take-charge energy to be the be-all and end-all of everything good for a nation and its inhabitants. Exceptionalism has created, if you will, a blindness to America's history of its ills and lack of morality. We have today some Americans who have flatly stated that African-Americans were better off under slavery. We have political forces teeming to obliterate the hard-won labor movement. The Christian Right backs only corporations and politicians who subscribe to a Puritan ethic, mindless in that ethic's war on humanity. The OWS movement is considered an outright war on capitalism. The singing duo Garfunkel and Oates have been roundly criticized for coming out with a parody, We-Are-The-World video entitled Save The Rich (see below). American exceptionalism is in full force.

So when is going to be America's next Hindenburg? It's next 9/11? When are we going to jolted back into the reality that we have a long way to go to be as perfect as we think we are? When it happens, let's hope that we will have the integrity and leadership to accept the reality check and go on from there.

I Heartily Apologize To Readers

Yes, I've been REALLY remiss in postings lately. I know you're out there thinking, WTF? Well, I have to say that my OpEdNews posts have literally taken on a life of their own and the viewership makes it necessary. And it's difficult posting for numerous venues. Nonetheless, I apologize for the neglect. 


So here's a round-up of recent posts - the links will lead you to them.


For a Good Time, Call ... Your Local Church Lady. Leslee Unruh is an insane abstinence-only freak.


The Monday Sermon: Why We should Keep The Wall Between Church And State to Tear Down The Walls Of Bigotry And Hatred. Jefferson had motives.


Fighting The Richteous Right with 300 OpEdNews Articles. Was It Worth It? Boy, am I tired!

Fighting The Righteous Right With 300 OpEdNews Articles: Was It Worth It?

There is something to be said about a passion for exposing hypocrisy.

"... and then Dr.Meade thundered, losing his temper: 'Our men have fought without shoes before and without food and won victories. And they will fight again and win!...Think of - think of Thermopylae!'

...'They died to the last man at Thermopylae didn't they, Doctor?' Rhett asked, and his lips twitched with suppressed laughter."

Articles on religion and politics are like warriors in the culture wars: they can attack or defend whenever necessary. So when my number for OpEdNews came to 300, I could only think of : Thermopylae...
and Rhett Butler.


I have a thing for Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind, not only for the feisty character of Scarlett O'Hara, but for the wit and cynicism of Rhett Butler. A close examination of the characters reveals that Mitchell gives every character a certain amount of depth by revealing what their thoughts are, but not Rhett - he is observed in detail, but his inner self and motives are always mysteries left to the imagination of the reader. I like to think that his motives, his cynicism, his passion run too deep for analysis. Rhett Butler is passionate about life, people and beauty in the world, but he never lets on. He must be a tremendously frustrated, closeted writer.


That is one of his personality traits I differ with: I am certainly not reticent to write about my passion.


Passion. The culture wars do not lack for passion. OpEdNews makes a writer's work look serious and effortless in the same tome and at the same time. That's because there so much passion. Writers like Chris Hedges go about skewering the Right with an intensity and passion that seems almost inbred and the writing seems effortless. Would that were really so, at least with my own fare: an article can take me from 5 hours to three days.


Yes, every day writing about the culture wars can be said to be filled with passion, yet there's irony in that each day's writer's routine (at least mine) is frustrated by a tedium which must be endured to form the next soldier.


News Feeds: The Culture Warrior's Life's Blood and The Near Death Of His Soul. 


I often wonder if people realize how many news feeds a culture war writer has to go through each day to cull the best ideas - or how demoralizing news feeds are to someone who has to deal with the exigencies of the culture wars created by Rightwing politics and the Christian Right. They're a dream and a curse: emergencies on the screen occur as if they are there to personally frustrate writers like me. Yet each morning I wake up to a string of headlines for AP, CNN, CBS, MSNBC, LGBTQ Nation,  Firedog Lake, Crooks and Liars, Joe.My.God., Religion Dispatches, Right Wing Watch, Think Progress, The Daily Dish (Andrew Sullivan), OpEdNews and my own blog, The Devil and Dan Vojir (to prove to myself that I actually lived through yesterday). After perusing them with as much elation or rancor I can stomach, I can finally savor my morning coffee - usually my third cup.


News feeds can kill the creative spirit, however: the barrage of news is frightening and it often looks as if absolutely EVERYTHING has been written already. The soul is almost fatally challenged. I keep reminding myself that writers like Chris Hedges, Andrew Sullivan and Joe Jervis must also endure the same barrage of news, commentaries, trivia, anecdotes, and WTFs. They sift through it all to come up with ten, twenty posts a day. All original. God! Sometimes I hate their prolific, creative asses.


The State of Religion and Politics Today: The Rise Of Demonizers and The Fall Of Reason


One might think that writing on religion and politics presents a constant inner, suicidal struggle: to kill yourself now by means of sheer depression or to kill yourself later by means of uncontrollable laughter. Yeah, it's true. With the machinations of Cindy "Japan-is-shaped-like-a-dragon" Jacobs,  Anne Coulter(geist), Pat Robertson, Bryan Fischer, Rick Santorum, Pope Benedict XVI, Concerned Women of America, the NRA, the GOP and FOX/Faux News, it's a wonder that any progressive writer is still alive.


I chose the latter form of suicide: I figure that laughing AT them all while I'm going to my death can cause the most damage: "Against The Assault of Laughter, Nothing Can Stand" - Mark Twain. Yep, I'm going to take as many of them with me as I can.


And I have so many, many potential victims: the demonizers who feed their righteous arrogance by spouting hatred and fake morality are on the rise. Crouching behind the rise in hate groups is the growing number of what Andrew Sullivan calls "religionists" or "Christianists", those people for whom separation of church and state is the greatest biblical "abomination" outside of  homosexuality and women's reproductive rights. They are joined by coat-tail demonizers such as Tea Party Obama-haters.


And with their rise, comes the fall of reason: Kentucky's Creation Museum has spawned a $175 million Noah's Ark theme park (sans dinosaurs, of course). The State of Tennessee has flown in the face of reason by passing an "abstinence only" (non)sex education bill. The GOP denies that there's any war on women while BOTH parties pay their women staffers less than men. To the rest of the world, America has become one big WTF? and is now hiding its conservative and over-religionized head in the sand.

3 years - 300 articles - 250,000+ words - 464 comments - 410,000+ page views

All this begs the question: is any of it worth it? The long days and even longer hours. The frustrating feeling  that one is tilting at windmills. The never ending string of bigots and hypocrites. The constant nurturing of a snarky attitude.  Is there any encouragement? Is there any sense of accomplishment? Is there any sense of ... self?


The drive to communicate in some people (like me) is defeating in that we rarely stop for a response, so a venue like OpEdNews  let's us experience encouragement in many ways: thank God for OpEdNews readers. And as for my own  sense of accomplishment, to me, exposing hypocrisy is exhilarating to the point of orgasm.


You could say that exposing hypocrisy is its own reward.


Dealing With The Depths of Contempt and The Heights of The Orgasms


I have a small black named Katie Scarlett (of course). She has a special perch attached to my desk -a slideout topped with a pad from an old footstool. She routinely scratches at my shoulder to demand attention or treats. But most of the time she lays across the pad with her head slung slightly over the edge of her spot. It may not seem a taxing job for a writer's cat, yet she works tirelessly at being my guardian, my critic, the mirror of my tired soul. She is the innocence I lack. Her presence helps me deal with the highs and lows of writing against the Christofascist Right and Conservative Clowns. She sees me through the depths of contempt and the heights of those orgasms brought about by sadistically skewering hypocrites.


Thank you Katie. Thank you OpEdNews readers.

BATTLE OF THE BULLIES!!: Dan Savage and Brian Brown To Fight Over ... "Bullsh*t"

(Author's note: Why didn't I get as much attention for calling some beliefs "crap"? Some people have all the luck!)

At a high school journalism convention, anti-bullying and gay activist Dan Savage (founder, It Gets Better movement and creator of the neologism "Santorum"), as is his want, made a crude remark making a point we all know: parts of the Bible are simply ... bullsh*t. However, he didn't say that the Bible was ALL bullsh*t, just parts of it, especially some of the laws of Leviticus. Some students showed their disdain for Savage's comments by walking out.*

Now people (aka FOX News) are calling Dan Savage a bully
...and THE WAR has begun.

Glenn Beck's THE BLAZE:

ANTI-BULLYING CRUSADER ATTACKS THE BIBLE AND CURSES CHRISTIAN TEENS DURING HIGH SCHOOL SPEECH**
Front and center in the phalanx of Christian Right critics is Brian Brown. The National Organization for Marriage's president became absolutely incensed at Savage's "savaging" (Brown's wit is astounding) of the Bible. Yes, that's the same National Organization for Marriage (NOM) that tried unsuccessfully to boycott Starbuck's for its support of same-sex marriage.***

Let me lay down a public challenge to Dan Savage right here and now: You want to savage the Bible? Christian morality? Traditional marriage? Pope Benedict? I’m here, you name the time and the place and let’s see what a big man you are in a debate with someone who can talk back. It’s easy to make high-school girls cry by picking on them. Let’s pick on someone our own size!

You will find out out how venal and ridiculous your views of these things are if you dare to accept a challenge.

The response:

FRIDAY, MAY 4, 2012

HORRORS / RELIGION / LGBTQITSLFAConfidential to NOM's Brian Brown: You're On, Motherfucker

posted by DAN SAVAGE on FRI, MAY 4, 2012 at 2:02 PM

I will name the time and the place, per your offer, as soon as possible. Looking forward to it, NOMnuts.

Lines have been drawn. Souvenir dueling pistals are being made. National bookies are taking bets. People are praying that the event take place near their home so that they won't have to break their bank accounts on airfare to attend the event. Forget the upcoming election debates - this will be the one for the history books.

The uproar even spawned some critics who are usually Savage's biggest allies, but most of that criticism resulted from what they considered Savage's being "crass" and not the message itself: that parts of the Bible are pointedly ignored because they are WRONG. 

But what exactly is this "war" about? The horrendously rotten, bullying, evil, persecuting passage of Dan Savage's speech:

“People often point out that they can’t help it. They can’t help with the anti-gay bullyings because it says right there in Leviticus, it says right there in Timothy, it says right there in Romans that being gay is wrong. We can learn to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about gay people the same way we have learned to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about shellfish, about slavery, about dinner, about farming, about menstruation, about virginity, about masturbation. We ignore bullshit in the Bible about all sorts of things.

The immediate context of the offending speech is here. Savage points out the strict Leviticus laws concerning slavery and stoning women who have been found not to be virgins before marriage ("Calista Gingrich lives") and focuses on the fact that we totally discount such concepts while taking the one concept of homosexuality and making discrimination against gays legitimate. He was making the bullying point of "you're going to hell" ridiculous, i.e:  "bullshit." 

What the incident brought out, however, is that an enormous over-sensitivity to anything dealing with the Bible is...bullshit. Students began walking out once the Bible was mentioned. Their brains shut down before Savage's point could even be formed. The possibility of the entire walk out having been staged has been discussed: knee-jerk reactions can be suspicious.

Note in the clip below, the fact that FOX News' Steve Doocy says nothing about the applause and laughter Savage's speech also created. In fact, the amount of students in agreement far outnumbered the dissidents, conveniently making "Christianity" look like a persecuted minority.

For the convenience of Savage's critics, I created a Wordle with a graphic that NOM can use, it being in the form of a wedge - NOM's favorite shape. It's too bad that the word "bullsh*t" wound up to be so small because Savage only said it about three times. (If you click on the actual Wordle below it, "bullsh*t" is easier to read).

 




So the uproar is really it's own "bullshit" - but the debate promises to spawn super bullshit from the losers: Odds are on Savage to win, but "belief" and twisted reasoning will belong to Brown in the end. Leave it to the likes of Glenn Beck and Steve Doocy to see to it.  




*Some people think the walk-out was suspiciously contrived since, you will notice in the video, students began to walk out BEFORE the offensive term.
**Evidently being called "pansy-assed" is extreme cursing. (NOTE: this article was posted under the heading of "Science" WTF?)
 *** Starbuck's stock remains at an all-time high.