Yet another personal responsibility lawsuit

Among recent, outrageous attempts to legislate away personal responsibility, the mother of a… Among recent, outrageous attempts to legislate away personal responsibility, the mother of a South Side Middle School student blows many of the rest out of the water.

The student, a 13-year-old girl, was suspended in May – along with her partner in crime, a teenage boy – after classmates informed school authorities that the two had engaged in oral sex on a school bus during a field trip. The students admitted to the consensual act and are suspended until Oct. 29. They are permitted to attend the district’s alternative education program in the meantime.

They did the deed, they admitted to it, and punishment was meted out accordingly.

The story ought to end there. The girl’s mother, however, decided to claim – in court – that her daughter’s constitutional rights had been violated by the suspension, and that the school district’s policy on sex acts on the bus was unclear.

Thankfully, Beaver County Judge George E. James threw out the Aug. 29 appeal.

Unfortunately, an embarrassing situation has been turned into a debacle, a social nightmare and a failure in parenting for the girl.

While her name is not in the press, her peers – the very people, especially at middle school age, whose ridicule she likely fears the most – know who she is. As if being known for making bus rides more exciting won’t be bad enough, she now has the added burden of lawsuit-scorn to bear.

Which isn’t to say the youngsters, themselves, didn’t make a heinous error of judgment. They did, and they were sanctioned appropriately. The school stepped in and corrected socially unacceptable behavior.

The mother, though, has gone out of her way, not only to further embarrass her daughter, but also to sabotage any possible good that could come out of such an unfortunate incident.

The girl is learning, from her mother, that there is no need to take responsibility for her actions. If she does something wrong and gets caught, she’s now learning, she should simply complain to higher and higher echelons of authority.

The mother, while clearly grasping at semantic straws, is also teaching the girl that anything not expressly forbidden is fair game.

There are no signs in most offices forbidding the removal of one’s pants and dancing the polka on the conference-room table. If everyone followed this woman’s logic, corporate meetings would get a lot more interesting.