Jan 31st, 2004, 02:53 PM
Conservative fights to be right - liberals oppose
Student fights for the right to be 'right'
Conservative teen shakes up campus
Tim Bueler, like many cocksure 17-year-olds, is strident in expressing his political beliefs.
And to him, the Republican Party leans too far to the left.
That was the spark that launched his Conservative Club at Rancho Cotate High School in the Sonoma County town of Rohnert Park and ignited two months of rhetorical ugliness on campus. It also put him on the conservative talk show circuit, including an appearance Thursday on Fox television's "The O'Reilly Factor."
It all started on Dec. 3, when Bueler posted a flyer announcing a new "Conservative Hot Line" for the 1,800 students at his high school. It encouraged students to call the hot line to report "un-American comments expressed by your liberal teachers."
"Let's take a stand against the liberal traitors who call themselves teachers," the flyer urged.
Two days later, an anonymous teacher drafted a response proposing a "Liberal Hot Line," which parodied the tone of Bueler's missive.
"Let's take a stand against the neo-conservative wing-nuts who call themselves Americans," the flyer declared.
Things could have stopped there, but backing off, apparently, isn't in Bueler's nature. So, a week later, he fired off another newsletter.
"Liberals," it pronounced, "welcome every Muhammad, Jamul and Jose who wishes to leave his Third World state and come to America -- mostly illegally -- to rip off our health care system, balkanize our language and destroy our political system."
That did it.
Latino students were furious, and 40 school employees and teachers, including Principal Mitchell Carter, signed a letter protesting the inflammatory rhetoric. Bueler claimed he was threatened, called "Nazi" and other epithets, even by teachers, who he said refused to protect him from angry mobs of classmates. He soon was being escorted to and from class by school security officers.
After Bueler's anti-immigrant newsletter came out, school staff suggested to him that he stay home for a few days as "a cooling-off period," according to a fact sheet provided by the district.
For his part, Carter, the principal, isn't responding to questions and is referring calls to district Superintendent Michael Watenpaugh, who has criticized Bueler for distributing inflammatory material without first getting permission from a student adviser, as is school policy.
District officials have acknowledged, however, that the school faculty and the principal made some "missteps" that may have helped inflame matters.
Watenpaugh said Carter and others officials were wrong for suggesting the "cooling-off period."
The situation has remained volatile.
For example, 15 police officers swarmed onto campus to quell disturbances following the Conservative Club's Jan. 16 meeting.
Nonetheless, the school has not silenced Bueler, who started the club -- which now claims 50 members -- last fall.
And the lanky junior appears to be enjoying, if not reveling in, his role at the center of an ideological free-for-all. He has become a hot commodity on conservative talk radio shows, where he has not been shy about expressing his support for God, guns and country and his contempt for liberals. Several nationally syndicated television shows have called for interviews, including, he says, "Good Morning America." School officials have gotten thousands of e- mails from people across the country who, they say, were whipped up into a righteous frenzy by a stream of rhetoric.
A good deal of the verbal pyrotechnics have come from Bueler's hero, ultra-conservative radio personality Michael Savage, as well as Internet pundits and the right-leaning Washington Times.
They paint Bueler as a patriotic hero who stood up to howling liberal hypocrites trying to stifle his voice and trod upon the traditional American values he was bravely trying to uphold.
"Remember the movie 'Rebel Without a Cause'?" asked Savage, the radio host whose book, "Savage Nation," Bueler borrowed liberally from in outlining his club's philosophy. "This kid represents rebels with a cause. He represents the new counterculture."
All of which is a bunch of ideological baloney swathed in righteous propaganda, according to Mark Alton, the Rancho Cotate athletic director and science teacher who co-wrote the faculty letter protesting Bueler's comments.
"Certain outside conservative groups are using this to further their own political agenda, which is to attack the public education system," Alton said.
The real issue, he said, is not free speech but how to maintain peace on a school campus by having rational discourse.
"Those statements about illegal immigration and students of color and his attack on liberal teachers as traitors offend people, and many of us think they are inappropriate," Alton said. "He has a right to his opinions, and nobody wants to deny him his rights, but there are certain things that are inappropriate on a school campus. When hateful, intolerant discourse is being used, it is our responsibility to respond."
The fact that Bueler cannot walk around campus without an escort isn't something the First Amendment can do anything about, said UC Berkeley constitutional law Professor Jesse Choper. What's significant, he said, is that the school district provided that security.
"This school district chose to honor his free speech and sought to protect him from threats. That's commendable," Choper said. "It is not totally clear that (Bueler) had an enforceable constitutional right to go as far as he did, such as calling the teachers names like that. By no means am I saying that they could have stopped him, but they responded in a responsible fashion. ''
For his part, Bueler seems comfortable in the magnifying glare of the media spotlight. He sat at home recently contemplating interview requests from at least four national television talk shows and a scheduled appearance Feb. 7 as the featured speaker at the conservative Eagle Forum's annual convention.
" 'Good Morning America' is a little shaky,'' he scoffed, referring to efforts by producers to get him on the prestigious show. "They're real liberal. "
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