A Message from Eliza Byard, GLSEN Executive Director - March 2010

In the mid-1950s, as much of the U.S. Congress remained cowed by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his ilk, an attorney named Joseph Welch finally called the Senator out on his reckless cruelty with a simple question: "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

The time has come to ask that question of anti-LGBT activists in Massachusetts. As we were preparing to send this eNewsletter out, members of the House Ways and Means Committee of the Massachusetts legislature gutted a pending anti-bullying bill of key provisions, seemingly at the behest of anti-LGBT activists such as Brian Camenker of Mass Resistance. Camenker had attacked the bill as an effort to promote a "gay agenda" in schools and stifle free speech.

Let's be clear: the bill pending in the legislature was nowhere near perfect. Indeed, GLSEN and GLSEN Massachusetts had declined to endorse the bill because it lacked crucial provisions that research has shown to reduce the victimization of LGBT students, and to improve school climate for all students. However, the Senate bill included other measures that might well have had an impact on bullying, and which now have been removed from the House version:

• Mandatory training for school staff on responding to bullying;
• Required reporting of bullying incidents by faculty to school administrators;
• Mandatory disciplinary action against bullies;
• Required prompt investigations of reported incidents by principals; and
• Mandatory reporting to the parents of both the bullies and the targets about the incident and any remedial action.

Perhaps most importantly, the original bill represented a serious effort on the part of the legislature to respond to the bullying-related suicides of Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover and Phoebe Prince. When the Senate passed the bill last week, Carl's mother, Sirdeaner Walker, hailed the bill as a "great first step," and said that she was fighting for effective anti-bullying measures to protect students in Massachusetts and across the nation in order to secure Carl's legacy.

So, to summarize, anti-LGBT activists pressured legislators to remove important anti-bullying measures from a bill that Sirdeaner Walker considered part of her son's legacy – measures clearly designed to benefit all students – rather than have there be any suggestion that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts intends to protect LGBT students from bullying and harassment. They would block a sincere and non-LGBT specific bill, denying all students any measure of additional protection, in their relentless effort to stop schools from doing anything to protect LGBT students.

Joseph Welch's confrontation with Senator McCarthy drew applause from the members of the public present at the hearing where it occurred, and is generally credited as marking the beginning of the end of the Senator's reign of innuendo and intimidation in Washington, DC. As of this writing, there are signs that this time, Camenker and his ilk may also have gone too far.

The removal of the mandatory reporting and training language has exposed the fact that these legislators and activists are not interested in helping young people. Legislators who want to see effective action are prepared to reintroduce key language – including, perhaps, the enumeration left out of the original bill – rather than allow an ineffective, purely symbolic bill to pass. We wish them every success.