First, a resounding THANK-YOU to the House for demolishing Senator Joseph “Stalin” Carter’s (R-Gulag, Georgia) Senate Bill 506 by a resounding vote of 103 to 61.

Frankly, I cannot believe THIS bill actually made it out of the senate. Those folks are always pompously declaring themselves to be “the deliberative body” of this state. They would have better luck deliberating where the lint in their navels come from (and WE would probably be a much better state) than having this balderdash legislation pass.

Senator Joseph “Stalin” Carter’s original bill (the one the Senate madcappers passed) required the following from the state’s public school system:

1) Every student would have to have their BMI calculated twice per year. “BMI” stands for Body-Mass-Index, and it is a measure of how healthy or how obese someone is.

2) The BMI scores would not be identifiable by anyone for any one kid, but, each school’s collection of BMI values would be aggregated and averaged and compared to the state’s aggregated values. Those schools found to have an average BMI that lies outside the “state school norm” would be designated an “unhealthy school zone.” (No more cookies for any school designated as “unhealthy”…backpacks and lunch bags would be searched at the door and any food deemed to be unhealthy by Senator Stalin would be confiscated and the student marched-off to the gulag. Just kidding…but, I’m not very far off in using absurdity to make the point about this legislation, am I?)

What constitutes the BMI? A person’s height and their weight. Period.

To those of you who like to consider yourselves as having a basic ability to think, tell me…what makes a child 18 or under so significantly different than most adults?………………..

Give up? No, you know the answer…I just can’t hear you respond. The answer is CHILDREN ARE GROWING HUMAN BEINGS!

Seriously, how stupid do you have to be to presume it is valid to apply the BMI to a person who is growing? Not “growing old,” but growing as in getting taller, getting wider, growing in bone density, etc., etc., etc.

The BMI is only a valid measurement of someone’s physical state if that someone has reached a steady-state of not growing any taller. Duhhhhhhh…

With Joseph “Stalin” Carter’s line of thinking, a whole school that happened to have a lot of lower-than-average-height kids one year could be designated as an “unhealthy school zone” and cause THAT school’s parents to suddenly spend their time worrying about something they might not have ot worry about as time goes on. (Damn! That biology stuff is a REALLY difficult concept for state senators to grasp, isn’t it?)

I understand Stalin Joe’s “good intentions” here. He thinks physical education is a good thing and he wants schools to re-introduce it into their curriculums, and he thinks offering-up a statistic will help goad the schools into focusing on it.

But, you know what? The reason why PE has been driven OUT of the public schools is because of dear old George Dubya Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” legislation. Under this federal legislation, your state can only “measure-up” to one federally mandated statistic: the scholastic competency of the students. Anything else must be discarded in the curriculum to make sure the students study, study, study, and…don’t forget, study in order to do well on federal tests. If Carter wants to find someone to blame for obese kids, he can look to his federal government heroes…those Republicans who voted FOR this legislation.

Now, far be it for me to just bitch about something without offering a viable, practical solution. And, it is a non-state-legislative idea: There are physical fitness trainers in private practice who would LOVE to volunteer their time to help educate kids on eating healthy and exercising and living healthy lifestyles. This could be done after school, or somehow worked into the day (maybe during the time the students would have been tasked with having their height and weight taken by the school nurse). I hear that all a school system has to do is just ask for volunteers from their community (Doh! What a concept! A school system asking for help, rather than having someone shove something down their throat) to help set-up a health and fitness program.

Maybe a Senate Resolution would have been a better step. Maybe just an idea that Carter started offering op-eds to be printed in local newspapers would have been a better start to educating the public on obesity and how the epidemic can be slowed down.

But…to ram a state-mandated, socialist-centric bill down the throats of school systems, the kids, their parents, etc. is to demonstrate a clear lack of understanding on what it means to be a Republican. Senator Joseph Carter flunks the test on having the ability to claim he is a “Republican.” This guy and his ideas should be considered to be quite dangerous. I can only shudder to think what his next idea will be…?

P.S. The following State Senators are my heroes for voting against this legislation back on February 29…and, they are not all Republicans:

BROWN, 26TH
CHAPMAN, 3RD
COWSERT, 46TH
DOUGLAS, 17TH
HENSON, 41ST
HUDGENS, 47TH
JACKSON, 24TH
MULLIS, 53RD
MURPHY, 27TH
SCHAEFER, 50TH
SEABAUGH, 28TH
SMITH, 52ND
WILES, 37TH

This entry was posted by Bill Simon, on Saturday, April 5th, 2008 at 8:56 pm and is filed under Rumors and You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.