Jarimir said:
Well, laws exist to enforce social order and keep society functioning. Murder is illegal because you can't really keep society functioning if everyone just runs around killing each other.
To be honest though when it comes to morality the US system addesses the question by defining a few things as "mala in se" or "Evil In Of Themselves" without any further justification. It's one of the major cornerstones of our legal system. Other than that morality isn't supposed to apply, because it's a highly subjective thing. What's moral and right to one person, and what is to another doesn't nessicarly match up. To a Muslim it might be perfectly acceptable to stone a woman to death as an example if she doesn't marry the guy who raped her, to a non-Muslim that's a moral outrage. The US deals with this kind of situation by not evaluating the events morally but by having put laws into place banning rape, murder, and other things for purposes of social order, and then not granting religious or moral exception... the rule of law trumping any paticular moral code.
Every once in a while when you hear someone knocking the US system, and indeed that of most civilized nations, you gear the quote "This is a nation of laws, not of Justice" which is used out of context. The point being that Justice can mean differant things to differant people based on their point of view, which is why the law supersedes it in an absolute
sense.
I'm probably not articulating this well, and it's been a long time since I studied Criminal Justice (ironic name that, given my point), but that's the gist of it.
The problem with defining bullying along the lines of harassment, is that it's pointless, since those laws already exist (hence the referance). Of course this gets back to one of my initial points about this whole thing being stupid to begin with (having a lot to do with why it was undermined doubtlessly) because the issue isn't so much a matter of there not being appropriate laws and policies to cover these situations already, but a problem with people enforcing them. Your only supposed to be creating new laws (or creating amendments to existing ones) if the problem in question has not been addrssed already.... in this case it has. The problem is nobody enforcing those laws.
In the end this whole law was a political stunt for the people in authority to prove that they are doing something, without actually having to do anything. They can then say "well, we did all we can, we pased a law" which is easier than enforcing the laws in cases like this.
I explained earlier exactly why Bullying continues and has become part of society. Consider though that to stop this, especially with how heavily ingrained into society it is over many genrations, you'd wind up having to expel tremendous amounts of students, and fire vast numbers of educational workers and administrators. After all by policy if 20-30 kids on a sports team ar bullying one kid, you need to punish them all for some pretty harsh things. This sounds great up until you look at what the numbers will wind up being given the current social order and you wind up with all the parents freaking out because they can't be home with their kids (having to work) and of course because all their children are being deprived of their educations (even if by their doing). Nationwide if this caught on, just imagine what it would be like if like 60% of the kids in school were all expelled, and when your looking at the extent of this problem and how engrained in the school experiences it is, that's probably conservative.... and that's not even getting into the teachers and administrators who would be held responsible, we already have trouble finding enough teachers to do the job, and the people to keep the system functioning. You fire them all, and where do you get the replacements?
Think of the size of the problem, and the simple fact that it has no easy solution. That's what this law was about, it was a stunt by the law makers to try and prove they were doing something, without actually having to do anything. It's easier to pass a new law and call it progress, than to actually enforce the laws and do something when it's a problem like this.
Incidently this is a big issue in general with the USA, and other first world nations, you can't solve any problems without doing a lot of damage and hurting a lot of people especially in the short term. It thus becomes easier to let things remain broken than to fix them. When you consider people needing to be re-elected, obviously since nobody is going to vote for the politician that caused widescale social problems/violence/deaths, the politicians don't want to take major action for their own reasons. Especially seeing as elections happen every few years and when your looking at big problems that can take decades to solve, a politician can't take a long term view of "short term choas now, I stick to my guns, and people will understand when it gets better even if they won't see it for 10 years or so"... he starts something, gets voted out, the new guy slaps a band aid on it or re-asserts the previous system, and nothing changes except the guy who tried to do something is now viewed as an incompetant, a monster, or both irregardless of why he did something or whether it would have worked. It's hard to be a strong/tough leader and deal with the tough issues when you can just be shown the door. Our style of democracy has many advantages, but also many downsides, and this is one of the downsides.
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