Thumbs Up — Disarming bullies

Brandon Baldwin provided Brunswick Junior High School students with a clear, direct and valuable life lesson last week: “Rather than focusing on changing bullies, our focus should be on making the victim feel better about themselves or showing them that they could stand up, too.”

Such wisdom applies not just in the hormonally charged tar pit of middle school society. Although often ignored, it extends to the workplace, global relations and even romantic relationships.

Bullies behave the way they do to draw attention to themselves. Focusing instead on the victim a bully attempted to use as a means to gain that attention not only shows appropriate empathy for the victim, it deprive the bully of his or her desired outcome.

Thumbs Down — Piling on

Republican legislators on the Labor, Commerce, Research and Economic Development Committee seem to feel that jobless Mainers aren’t suffering enough.

On Thursday, they shepherded through LD 1725, which would delay unemployment benefits for newly laidoff workers owed accrued vacation time and force unemployed workers to jump through more hoops to receive benefits.

The bill’s sponsor, Sen Christopher Rector, R-Thomaston, argues that it’s a tool to fight fraud. Given that Maine’s unemployment fraud rate ranks as the fifth lowest in the nation, the new Republican majority in Augusta would do better to focus on creating jobs that would put tools in workers’ hands.

Thumbs Up & Down — No need for bitter pill fight

To date, fairness has prevailed over political opportunism and bullying by religious leaders to protect President Barack Obama’s mandate that health insurers provide free coverage of contraceptives.

Efforts to exempt insurance plans provided by employers who identify themselves as faith-based institutions, most recently the “Blunt Amendment in the U.S. Senate, have failed.

That’s proper, and lawmakers who believe that government and employers have no place in American women’s private lives should continue to fight off future efforts to neuter the rule, which are inevitable during an election year.

Tinkering with the rule would place women’s bosses — and those who preach to, minister to and govern them — between women and their doctors. No one should infringe on that relationship.

Sadly, this could all be avoided. Other nations — including Brazil, Italy and others with large Roman Catholic populations — avoid asking faith- based employers to cover care that raises questions of conscience by relying on a single payer insurance system.

In countries that use a single-payer system — in other words, every other civilized nation — these debates involving bishops, politicians and citizens play out in government buildings, not medical offices.

The debate should be about public policy, not insurance policies.

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