Avoiding the inevitable SNAFU when PDA meets NRA

You send your kids off to school every morning with a hug and a kiss, hopeful and trusting that they will get through the day without being assaulted by some sociopath in the hallways.

But then, when you pick up the morning paper, you see that blood-chilling article about the latest school incident.

You know the article I’m talking about. The most recent one last week featured an assailant named Ella F. (I won’t use her full name, because that might only encourage other assailants eager to see their name in print.)

Ella is a 14-year-old eighth-grader at Jackson Heights Middle School in Oviedo, Florida, who recently learned that a male classmate was having a bad day. In response, she did the unthinkable—she gave him a brief hug. “It was literally for a second,” she later said.

Fortunately, school officials were there to save the day from personal assaults of that nature. Principal Sarah Mansur-Blythe (heroes should always be recognized by name) gave Ella a morning detention for violating the school’s Public Display of Affection (PDA) rule—a zero-tolerance rule for which there is no exception.

Ella’s mother asked the principal, “If something had happened in our family, and she needed to console her cousin, or her cousin wanted to console her, would Ella get in trouble?”

“Yes, ma’am,” principal Mansur-Blythe told her. “She would get a PDA.”

Because we can’t have our schools tolerate a child’s affection. Not even if it’s compassion.

It’s not that Ella didn’t know the rule. After all, she was warned last month about PDA when a boy put his hand on her head and she didn’t shriek for help. Some sociopaths never learn.

Take the case of Megan C, an Illinois eighth-grader who was labeled a “second offender” by her middle school for hugging two people in 2007. See what happens if you don’t bring down the hammer at the first glimpse of trouble? They turn into serial huggists. That’s why Ella F. of Florida had to be stopped, before she hugged again.

She’ll thank principal Mansur-Blythe in time. I know, because I am a recovering PDA offender.

It happened in the fall of 1965 during my senior year in a new high school to which I had just transferred that spring. At my parents’ urging, I tried hard to make new friends, and to my surprise my outgoing efforts were rewarded with a new girlfriend named Mary Jo.

I am ashamed to admit it today, but we occasionally held hands in the hallway when we thought we were safe from the controlling eyes of authorities. But PDA crime never pays, and in the end I was caught giving her a quick kiss as we parted to go to our separate classes.

We were both sent immediately to the dean, who started our road to recovery by asking Mary Jo what kind of trampy slut she wanted to grow up to be with such lascivious behavior—though he was careful to dance around the terminology. I’m sure administrators labor through intensive classes to learn professional sensitivity techniques like that.

Dean Frieberg happened to be my football coach, so I asked him to leave my now-humiliated-and-weeping girlfriend out of it and punish me double if he wanted to. I was the one who had kissed her, I told him, not the other way around. She was nothing more than the victim of a drive-by smooching.

He sent her off to class, and when we were alone he gave me a choice: I could take double detentions after school, which would mean that I would miss football practice, and thus the next game. He suggested that he would be disappointed in me if I went that route.

Or I could bend over and get whacked with a fraternity paddle.

Fair enough, I said. I wore Greek letters on my nether cheeks for days.

Thanks to Dean Frieberg, I learned my lesson about Public Displays of Affection in school. And later, in gratitude for my heroism, Mary Jo taught me a few new lessons in Private Displays of Affection. (With an outcome like that, I could have hugged Dean Frieberg, but…you know, there was that rule.)

That was a long time ago, when quality education meant clubbing a child with lumber every now and then to drive the point home. A lot has changed since then, leaving deans and principals today with few options other than detention or suspension in these kinder, gentler times.

But still, it’s nice to know that some things never change—like our institutional intolerance of tenderness of any kind between youngsters.

Because if we go soft on PDA, imagine the headlines we’ll be reading about girls hugging boys in the hallway once we finally pass those long-overdue laws that will allow students to carry concealed guns on campus.

Once that happens, it would just be a matter of time before some hug-happy girl accidentally flicked a boy’s safety and he fired off a round prematurely. You know how hair-triggered adolescent boys can be. Just ask any adolescent girl.

So when you hug your kids in the morning and help them reload their Glocks before putting them on the school bus, remind them that their right to bear arms doesn’t extend to using their bare arms on others.

Because as every school administrator knows, guns don’t kill students. Hugs kill students.

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