Originally posted by drwizardphd
When I read what he actually said, it makes a lot of sense.
Both Kevin Jennings and Suzanne Pharr bring up good points. We do raise our children in a culture of violence.
So, just cause you called me "bias", allows your murder by me to be the "proper and expected course"?

If that's the case, then I should
not be punished for it, because it would then be the norm and accepted since it was expected.
How many parents do you know that teach their children it's okay to kill someone for that reason?
If we continue to lie to ourselves and say it isn't happening, we're only going to make the situation worse. Kids in America are shooting up schools
at unprecedented rates, clearly there is a problem somewhere.
Absolutely 100% agreed! What has happened in the recent years that might have caused this? The simplest answer is we've taken away "right AND
wrong" and proper punishment for the wrong. And to add another one that I agree with...desensitizing.
Oh, and when I read this in the article, I couldn't help but laugh:
In a 1998 article(pdf), President Obama's safe school czar Kevin Jennings seems to be condoning murder by students subjected to homophobic
harassment.
In all seriousness, he obviously isn't condoning murder. He's pointing out the faults in the way we raise our children to react to adversity. Anyone
who thinks he is condoning school shootings needs to seriously re-evaluate their predisposition to bias.
Maybe. If he had just used a wrong word, "aberrant" here, I would totally agree with you. However, it doesn't seem to be just this once. He says
at the end of that quote, "They're doing what we've taught them to do."
Who? Who has taught them to kill for name calling? Except him, that is. Is this another case of choosing the wrong words in the same article?
And it's an "article", not something off the cuff, something he should have, and you know he most definitely did, go back and make sure his context
was clear. He purposedly chose the word "aberrant" for killing someone for name calling. He purposedly chose to say "we've taught them to do
[that]". If he didn't know what he was alluding to with his words, then should he really be the one writing rules and regulations for our schools'
safety?
I'm thinking he's not necessarily "condoning" murder, as stated in the commentary, thus the reason I didn't include that in the quote. I didn't
want to bias anyone by suggestion, therefore I quoted what he said, and only what he said. And you see that everyone, including you, read it as I
did.
I can't preclude you because you followed the link. And I'm assuming that since you followed that link, you followed the source link on that site
as I did, wanting to make sure that it was his actual quote. Therefore, you initially read it the same way as I and everyone else.
However, you then accepted what the last source said about what
they felt was what Jenkins meant as your own interpretation. Which I had tried
to do also, but I reread what he said and I just can't see anyway around it.
So, I did the post to see if I was reading it correctly and have summarized from the post.....every one reading Jenkins directly without
pre-suggestion, take it to mean that he was indeed saying that murdering for name calling was not out of the accepted norm, was not a deviation from
the expected. It just seems to me that he's saying that those who kill because they were called a name should not be held totally responsible for
it.
Again, not necessarily condoning murder, but saying to go easy on the perp 'cause they ain't responsible for their own actions.