Woke up to literally hundreds of Facebook notifications letting me know that many of those opposed to the judges ruling in the Cranston "prayer banner" case were now using the Internet to post bullying and threatening remarks against my niece Jessica. Over the course of the night a wonderful blog calling itself Jesus Fetus Fajita Fishsticks spent the night grabbing screenshots of the worst comments and putting them up in a too long list of hateful and threatening invective. It bothered me a lot, because some of the stuff was way over the top, including one supposed classmate of of my niece who tweeted, “what a little bitch lol I wanna snuff her”.
Cute.
So I spent my morning writing the following email to all the members of the Cranston School Committee (I've redacted the names here of the specific students):
My name is Steve Ahlquist and I am a brother to Mark Ahlquist and an uncle to Jessica Ahlquist, a student I am sure you are well aware of.
After Jessica's court win and subsequent press release, a rising tide of cyber bullying and threats of physical harm have been directed at her, and many of those doing so are students at Cranston West High School.
One student, Xxxxxx Xxxxxxx, has posted on Twitter that "everyone is going to beat you up now prob" and "gods going to fuck your ass with that banner you scumbag" among other pleasantries, including the admission that she is a proud racist, but that Jessica is worse than blacks. Another student, Xxx Xxxxxxxx says, "I think everyone should just fight this girl".
It gets worse. XX Xx Xxxxxx, another student, wrote, "...what a little bitch lol I wanna snuff her".
One of your students has publicly said that he wants to kill another student.
A website:
http://jesusfetusfajitafishsticks. blogspot.com/2012/01/ahlquist- screenshots-if-by-christian. html
Has collected an entire page of such bullying invective. Some of it is not from students under your care, much of it is.
All of this rises to bullying under Title 16:
http://www.rilin.state.ri.us/statutes/title16/16-21/16-21- 33.HTM
And appropriate action must be taken.
Beyond that, some of this behavior may rise to the level of hate crime, because as an atheist Jessica is part of a minority group, and entitled to the same protections as any other minority student under your care. Would this behavior be tolerated if the student wee Jewish, or black?
I am eager to receive your response.
I got a response three minutes after sending the letter. I don't get that kind of response from people who like me. Andrea Ianazzi was first to respond:
I am troubled by much of what I have seen and said so yesterday. However, I will not break confidentiality by discussing students behavior or discipline with you.
Followed by Frank Lombardi six minutes later:
Under no circumstances is this acceptable. While I advocated for the Mural to remain I tried to protect Jessica during meetings from some overly zealous members of the public. I assure you I will call mr nero immediately to have the subject of this email investigated.
P McFarland was next:
I agree with Mr Lombardi, so it will be addressed immediately.
Followed by Steven Bloom, Michael Traficante and Janice Ruggieri.
I summed it all up in a post I did for Rhode Island's Future, which can be seen here.
That lead to the Providence Journal posting two articles on their website:
Which mentioned me, my post on Rhode Island's Future and my blog Caution Church Ahead by name. Nice to get the shout out for my blog work, I guess. The other article was by Maria Armental, who has covered a lot of this case.
Later I wrote a piece on the case that I submitted as a possible Op-Ed for the Providence Journal. I hope they will run it, It was quite good, I think. But if they don't run it, I will, somewhere.
I want to thank everybody who helped me out today on this bullying thing. Stefan, Craig, Debbie, Stacy, and so many others were very helpful with information or just kind words.
Switching gears, if the world were normal right now, the thing I would be most excited about would be this:
We got Park Avenue in Cranston, which goes past the Cranston City Hall, the School Department building, several churches and a synagogue. This is living our values.
This is what we're about.
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