Pennsylvania school board cancels gay '30 Rock' actor's anti-bullying talk, citing his 'lifestyle'

Wilshire@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 556 points –
Pennsylvania school board cancels gay '30 Rock' actor's anti-bullying talk, citing his 'lifestyle'
nbcnews.com
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So, the school board is bullying him into not doing an anti-bully talk. I think maybe the school board should have been the one getting the speech and not the kids at the school...

All that anti-bullying bullshit is that. Bullshit. They encourage bullying. They claim they don't, but they do. If you're not "normal," you'll get bullied and the school will do very little about it.

My kids' experience has been pretty good in the schools they've been in, especially in the high school. I'm not saying there's no bullying, but I've heard plenty of stories from them where they and/or others stepped in right away and put that shit down.

I'm also plenty aware that this is unusual, and am quite thankful for my school district.

Well I don't know about your district, but in mine, we had to take my daughter out of public school and put her in online school because her bullying was so severe that she was having self-harm thoughts and the school did virtually nothing.

It's very much a case by case. I didn't have issues as a kid even though I was a total dweeb but I have coworkers who have done the same as you even though they were in good schools.

Typically they just let the bullies continue until somebody snaps and hits back, at which point the kid that snaps gets punish and the bullies get a stern talking to (maybe. If they don't have the teacher thoroughly gaslight into believing they're angels)

Ah, I see you're familiar with my last 2 years of HS. Finally just got my parents to transfer me to a local vocational school instead of dealing with it, because it was clear the school wasn't gonna do a damn thing.

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My oldest friend is gay. We met in kindergarten I think. I don't remember meeting him, he's just always been there. Cut to last year when my parents were saying they "don't approve of that lifestyle" and I asked them "Well, what about [this friend]?" They know he's gay, but since he doesn't have an accent or a limp wrist they don't seem to care. He lives down the street. We both went into the tech field. We hike. We're each married to our own spouses. We have pets. I pointed all this out and told them "if you disapproved of his lifestyle, you'd also disapprove of mine. It's not the LIFESTYLE, it's the IDENTITY you don't approve of." I haven't talked to my parents since. I'm ashamed to be related to them.

It's not the LIFESTYLE, it's the IDENTITY you don't approve of.

Oh that's insightful.

the lifestyle of being openly queer and not having died in the camps yet, specifically. they hate it when we do that.

No it isn't.

Insights are kinda like those magic eye paintings. They are definitely there, but not everyone can see them.

I'm good at magic eye.

I hope you're better at magic eye than you are challenging other people's points.

What I normally do is, I kick a stone and shout "I refute it thus!", so if you see me walking with a limp you know why.

haven’t talked to my parents since. I’m ashamed to be related to them.

Know that feeling. Welp if it is any help we can't choose our family, we can choose our friends. If we both decide to start talking to them again maybe we can setup a racist playdate for our parents. You know bring them to the park, pack a lunch of bacon and cheap beer.

One of the biggest idiots I ever met in my life said one of the smartest things I’ve ever heard in an argument with his sister.

“I’m your fucking sister!!”

He replied, “Yeah, well. I don’t like you! I didn’t choose you! The good lord put you assholes on me. I’ve chose all my friends and I choose to call them family. Y’all can get fucked!”

sorry your parents suck; good friends are better anyway.

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“It’s not discriminating against his lifestyle — that’s his choice,” Potteiger said in the meeting. “But it’s him speaking about it.”

Mental gymnastics gold medalist

If this displeases you, feel free to voice your opinion to the members of the board:

https://www.cvschools.org/school_board/board_members

Kelly Pottiger is from the hate group Moms for "Liberty."

Kelly Pottiger is from the hate group Moms for "Liberty."

Does she also have a lesbian sex tape or was that other cunt for liberty an outlier?

I'm sorry but the board president is from a township called Middlesex? what a bunch of perverts that are obviously trying to push their perverted sexual agenda onto children.

The irony here is it not being highlighted.

School board bullies unanimously agreed to bully anti-bully activist by removing him from anti-bully event.

All they heard was the word 'activist' and it sent their tiny minds reeling.

No, it's because he's gay, not because he's an activist.

Actually, it's both. They can't imagine that a gay person could be any other type of activist than a "gay activist" hellbent on turning all their precious "normal" children queer.

It's an topical event. They want the presenters to be randoms off the street?

Anti-bullying activists are precisely the kind of people that we don't want leading anti-bullying campaigns!

he is proud of his lifestyle

The bastard!

Also, he was great on 30 Rock.

Thank you for helping jog my memory, it's been so long since I'd watched I didn't know who he was on the show!

I've watched the whole thing through twice. It really was a brilliant show.

Wasn't he also on Weeds as Nancy Botwins sole bakery employee?

I don't remember. I couldn't get into that show. She was too awful.

It was pretty good until they left the suburbs (Nancy was still pretty awful, though, so your point stands). After that, it was like they tried to re-tool the show into a narconovella and failed hard.

I just have a lot of trouble with shows where everyone is irredeemable.

Fair enough. I tried to think of one character in Weeds who was alright, and I guess it was just Isabella (a minor character that may as well have been a lamp in the background). I guess Heylia also had her head screwed on right, but she was also a minor character.

But yeah, I agree with that about irredeemable characters with the sole exception of "It's Always Sunny...". They're more caricatures of terrible people, IMO, so I guess that's what makes it work.

Taking pride in something he should not be ashamed of! Who does he think he is?

So, they bullied him? Nice one guys! And you want to complain that we've got heads up our asses?

The school:

“We’re all trying to find the guys who bully”

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/78aa255c-e5ac-4d32-a57a-25d3423e9ec6.jpeg

So we're back to this eh.

We never really left. The bigots just got quieter for a little while, or were louder about other targets (like trans folks). Remember that gathering storm ad scaremongering about fay marriage? Those beliefs don’t just disappear.

about fay marriage?

You misspelled 'fey marriage', by the way.

damn forgot about this one. I would've hoped by this point in history shit like this would be universally ridiculed but alas...

damn I grew up like 20 mins away from this school. sadly between Philly and Pittsburgh it's just a red, anti-LGBTQ wasteland.

People keep fleeing to the cities for some crazy reason.

But then its time to redraw the districts and you still end up with a State Senate Seat represented by the five angriest racist grandpas a computer can draw a line around.

I grew up 40 minutes away and let it blows my mind because mechanicsburg is 15 minutes from Harrisburg and both areas are generally more liberal than where I even live. I'm sad now.

I grew up in Harrisburg and everybody called the west shore of the Susquehanna the "White Shore." Harrisburg is a perfect example of redlining and the racist interstate highway system, but it's a lot more diverse than the west shore. Moving away from the river you find quietly racist blue collar people, quietly racist white collar people, and then just plain racists.

Though if you really want to start hearing banjos you head up to Perry County. Or Clearfield shudder

God I fuckin... Like dude the fucking right gets upset when the fucking left wants to increase gun laws when there's a school shooting, but the fucking right is too stupid to fucking realize that if they stop being literal facists than maybe, just fucking maybe, kids won't be as depressed. Maybe if these kids could actually fucking see that its okay to be different, they'd be fine. And it fucking sucks because anti bullying shit like literally never features LGBT scenarios. Like actually fuckin run it back in your mind, cause I know damn well I never saw ANY anti bullying thing for gays. Hell, I fucking got suspended from highschool because a kid called ME a [that one really mean word for gay people D:]. If I wasn't such a narcissist I legitimately would not have made it out of highschool.

if they stop being literal facists than maybe, just fucking maybe, kids won’t be as depressed

A lot of these school shootings involve a kid from a very conservative family getting utterly blackpilled on some QAnon conspiracy bullshit and going off to do an adventurism against the PoC in school who have been bullying him merely by existing. And I can't help but feel that conservative adults are quietly thinking to themselves "Good, I wish more people would behave like this" as they publicly shake their heads in disapproval.

Whether its Dylann Roof or Patrick Wood Crusius or Kyle Rittenhouse or Daniel Perry, this is just a Kristallnacht by drips and drabs.

The mind of a conservative is actually insane. They will hear someone say the most vile, bigoted thing about minorities and just go "well we were all thinking it" like honestly it is insane. Its like they think that conservative views are the default, and any white person who disagrees with them is either "brainwashed by the left" or just acting like they disagree with conservative views because muh "woke society will kill you for agreeing with the truth"

"What if we have to stay over night, and there aren't enough rooms, and we have to share a room, and I forgot to bring a shirt to sleep in, and the stores are all closed..."

from speaking at a middle school anti-bullying assembly after concerns were raised about his political activism

Anti-bullying assemblies are political activism, at least two of them were open about it being because he’s gay

It sounds like this is a bit of a fuck-you from the MAGA crowd to the people who rightly got pissed off and got a "no politics" guideline in place after the district hosted a literal Trump rally in 2016.

The total lack of self-awareness is stunning but perhaps not surprising for Pennslyvania.

I wonder why the article doesn't mention the religion of the school board members. Especially Bud Shaffner.