Kentucky has an anti-bullying law on the books. It’s been there since 2008, but the ACLU, Kentucky Fairness Campaign, and Democrat legislators decided it needed to be enhanced this year. Therefore, on March 13, Kentucky Rep. Mary Lou Marzian (D-Louisville) and her associates on the House Education Committee, pressed for new anti-bullying legislation to be passed out of committee for a vote on the House floor.
Yet the bill, H.B. 336, met stiff opposition within the committee due to the fact that it was seen not simply as a piece of enhanced anti-bullying legislation, but as another step along the way in the implementation of the homosexual agenda.
As House Education Committee member Rep. Ben Waide (R-Madisonville) argued: “This bill is just an attempt to achieve equality by making some people more equal than others." He rightly recognized that H.B. 336 was not really about anti-bullying, but about “about gay rights in [KY] schools.”
H.B. 336 would have required schools to have a code of conduct that banned “bullying and harassment motivated by a student’s race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or learning disabilities.” But The Family Foundation of Kentucky wisely demonstrated to lawmakers how such language proves the bill is about protecting some children over others, instead of protecting all children all the time.
As The Family Foundation of Kentucky spokesman Martin Cothran said, “We believe that everyone should be protected at school, and we think that unless school safety laws apply to everyone, no matter who they are and why the bullying was done, they create second-class citizens in the law.”
A bill needs 15 votes to make it out of the 29-member House Education Committee, but H.B. 336 only received 13 in favor.
Ironically, after the vote was announced, Kentucky Fairness Campaign Director Chris Hartman resorted to bullying those who had opposed the anti-bullying legislation.
According to Louisville’s Courier Journal, Hartman “became verbally and physically abusive toward Andrew Walker, a policy analyst for The Family Foundation of Kentucky, who had lobbied against the bill.” As a result, The Family Foundation of Kentucky has called on the Fairness Campaign to issue a public apology for the behavior of Hartman.
Foundation spokesman Cothran added: “If you are really opposed to bullying, the last thing you probably want to do is engage in it in plain sight after a meeting in which a bill prohibiting it was just discussed.”