David McElroy

When 13-year-old Briar MacLean saw a bully put another student into a headlock in class last Tuesday, that wasn’t the worst of it.

“I heard the flick, and I heard them say there was a knife,” the Calgary, Alberta, teen told Canada’s National Post.

He quickly stepped up and pushed the bully out of the way. The teacher came from the other side of the room and the principal was called. Briar was obviously a hero for saving the other boy from the bully’s knife.

It wasn’t until later in the day that it became clear that the school didn’t see it that way. Leah O’Donnell, Briar’s mother, said a vice principal called from the school to say that her son had been involved in an “incident” and that he had decided to “play hero.” She was told that Briar’s action had been wrong.

“I asked: ‘In the time it would have taken him to go get a teacher, could that kid’s throat have been slit?'” O’Donnell told the National Post. “[The vice principal] said yes, but that’s beside the point. That we ‘don’t condone heroics in this school.'”

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In 1851, a southern physician named Samuel A. Cartwright concluded that many black slaves suffered from a mental condition which he called drapetomania. Those slaves afflicted by this malady had the desire to run away from their masters. Cartwright even prescribed whipping slaves as a “preventative measure.”

In the 1960s, some black men who were sent to mental hospitals for evaluation were disproportionately classified as schizophrenic. Why? Because they were involved in civil rights protests — which were said to make them fall victim to schizophrenia.

In the aftermath of World War II, doctors believed that fascist political beliefs were mentally disordered. There was even something call the “F scale,” which purported to test whether someone has fascist beliefs that need to be corrected.

Those are all ugly parts of the past for medical research and psychiatry, but we live in a more enlightened time when none of that could ever happen. Right? Well, maybe not.

Kathleen Taylor is an Oxford University researcher specializing in neuroscience. She suggested last week that religious fundamentalism might be treated as a mental illness soon.

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Do you support First Amendment Rights? What about Second Amendment rights? Some people have favorites. They like free speech, so they support the First Amendment, but they don’t like guns, so they don’t support the Second. Someone else might support guns, so they like the Second Amendment, but they don’t think criminal suspects should have any rights, so they think the Fourth and Fifth Amendments are worthless. And so on.

If you do that, you’re confused about what rights are. It’s hard to blame you, though, because you were taught misleading information in school and you’ve grown up in a country where people don’t seem to believe you can talk about rights without finding an amendment to point to and say, “See? That’s where this right comes from.”

Contrary to what you were probably taught, the Bill of Rights doesn’t give anybody a single right. This document was simply a list of a few of the basic rights that some early U.S. politicians thought should be written down and enshrined in the Constitution to make certain that these “obvious” things were protected. But it wasn’t meant to be a complete list. The Ninth Amendment was inserted to make sure that nobody could think that this was all the rights that exist. It reads:

“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

In other words, “We recognize that you have all the natural rights that are yours just because you’re a human being. We’re listing a few of them here, but that doesn’t make them more special than the ones we’re not listing.”

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