In the month since a horrific shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, we’ve seen a significant element of the right reveal its true colors. They aren’t too keen on kids speaking out on the issues that affect them if they lean even the slightest bit toward the left. That’s about the only thing you can conclude from the way some right-wingers have responded to the survivors of the Stoneman Douglas shooting speaking out for reforms to our gun laws.
Some have suggested they’re “crisis actors“–fake survivors trucked in to gin up support for gun control. Others suggested that George Soros, Everytown, and other liberal bogeymen were playing these kids like marionettes and feeding them scripted lines. Still others claimed that the kids had no business taking part in protests if they didn’t try to reach out to the gunman.
Well, less than 48 hours before the March for Our Lives stepped off, another right-winger got the bright idea to tell these kids to sit down and shut up. She believed that rather than speak up about their right to come home alive and in one piece, they ought to just go back to class.
Janet Mefferd has been wrong–bad wrong–about a lot of things for a long time. When an anti-immigration activist called for Obama’s overthrow, she simply went to break as if nothing happened. She believes Sandra Fluke was hiding her desire to have sex at taxpayer expense behind her fight to include birth control coverage in health care plans. She’s fawned over Operation Rescue’s Troy Newman–the same Troy Newman who has a convicted clinic bomber and accessory to murder on his payroll. More recently, she claimed that Barack Obama wasn’t really a Boy Scout because he grew up under “Communist influence.”
Mefferd fell down again on the Thursday edition of her early afternoon show on American Family Radio. She let it be known that she’d had it with the wave of student protests, and thought they’d be better off just sitting down. People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch got a clip.
During the second half of the show, Mefferd made her position clear about the wave of walkouts. It went beyond kids being used for “progressive political means,” which she found “sickening.” She thought it was a lot simpler than that.
“Go to school. I mean, this is just a basic–we’re the grown-ups and you’re the kids. No, you’re not walking out of high school to protest gun violence. You can do that at 3:30.”
She believed that this held true even in the case of anti-abortion students in Rocklin, California trying to organize a walkout of their own shortly after the walkout to protest gun violence. As much as she supported the principle of an anti-abortion walkout, Mefferd believed that allowing even one walkout made it appear that the kids were “running the show” and didn’t promote respect for adults and the educational process.
Later, while speaking with callers, Mefferd thought an anti-abortion march could “open a can of worms” and allow walkouts for left- and right-wing causes alike. It led her to blow a gasket.
“You know, I’m sick of it. At what point to do you have to have order in society and say, ‘Tough. You know what? Fine, graduate from high school, you’re 18, do whatever you want, but even if you go to college, hopefully you’ll have to encounter some grownups in the administration there’? Ha, ha, ha–well, some institutions still have them. But you know, enough is enough. You’re a minor, kid. Get back in class.”
Would Mefferd be so flippant if she listened to what kids actually have to live with in an age of mass shootings? On Friday, NPR’s “Morning Edition” played a StoryCorps piece about Dezmond Floyd, a fifth-grader from Houston, telling his mother, Tanai Bernard, how his school conducts shooter drills. Listen here.
“I want to take the bullet and save my friends.” Dezmond Floyd tells his mother, Tanai, about what it was like to experience his first active shooter drill with his fifth grade class. pic.twitter.com/KCC6DCg1lO
— StoryCorps (@StoryCorps) March 23, 2018
Two weeks earlier, Javon Davies, a sixth-grader from Birmingham, wrote out a will in case he didn’t come home from school alive. Watch here, courtesy WIAT in Birmingham.
Fifth-graders having to conduct active shooter drills. Sixth-graders writing their wills. And Mefferd thinks that kids should have to wait until after the bell rings to speak up about their right to come home alive and in one piece?
Even allowing for the fact that Mefferd and her audience spend most of their time in a bubble, this is staggering. Perhaps if Mefferd stepped out of her bubble for just a minute, she’d understand why kids are walking out.
(featured image courtesy Mefferd’s Website)
