It’s her fault.
Any smear will do.
Now the media is blaming Michele Bachmann for teen suicides in Minnesota. The article first published in Mother Jones has made its way to the front page of Yahoo news.
Yahoo reported:
An article in the liberal magazine Mother Jones criticizes Rep. Michele Bachmann(R-Minn) for her silence on a tragic string of nine suicides over the past two years in her district. The writer argues that Bachmann’s refusal to support antibullying legislation in the state in 2006 and the agenda favored by some of her anti-gay allies in Minnesota may have contributed to a harmful environment. And that climate, Mother Jones reporter Stephanie Mencimer suggests, could have played a role in the teen deaths in the troubled Anoka-Hennepin school district where Bachmann herself had once attended high school.
The story has quickly traveled around news sites, with The Daily Beast/Newsweek featuring it in an enormous banner headline earlier this morning: “TEEN SUICIDES SWEEP BACHMANN DISTRICT.” The Daily Beast write-up of the piece noted that state health and education officials have designated the school district a suicide contagion area.
In July 2009, the district–which has a policy requiring school employees to be “neutral” about homosexuality in front of students–settled with a student for $25,000 who said two teachers had harassed him for being gay. Four of the nine students who died by suicide in the district were believed to have faced harassment stemming either from a gay sexual orientation or from the perception among pers that they might have been gay.
Bachmann refused Mother Jones’ request to comment on the deaths, and has not previously offered comment on them. In 2006, she argued against an antibullying bill, saying at the time: “I think for all us our experience in public schools is there have always been bullies, always have been, always will be. I just don’t know how we’re ever going to get to point of zero tolerance and what does it mean? … What will be our definition of bullying? Will it get to the point where we are completely stifling free speech and expression? Will it mean that what form of behavior will there be—will we be expecting boys to be girls?”
Funny… We never saw the liberal media blame Obama for gang violence in Chicago but blaming Michele Bachmann for teen suicides in Minnesota is completely acceptable to the liberal media.
