The Reason Foundation, a self-described “libertarian” think-tank funded by the Koch Family Foundations and tied strongly to the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, is now trying to downplay the severity of bullying young people experience. In a column and interview with the Wall Street Journal, Reason Vice President Nick Gillespie suggests that kids “are safer and better-behaved” than in decades past and that parents are just “overprotective and thin-skinned”:

But is America really in the midst of a “bullying crisis,” as so many now claim? I don’t see it. I also suspect that our fears about the ubiquity of bullying are just the latest in a long line of well-intentioned yet hyperbolic alarms about how awful it is to be a kid today.[...]

Now that schools are peanut-free, latex-free and soda-free, parents, administrators and teachers have got to worry about something. Since most kids now have access to cable TV, the Internet, unlimited talk and texting, college and a world of opportunities that was unimaginable even 20 years ago, it seems that adults have responded by becoming ever more overprotective and thin-skinned.

Gillespie relies on data that suggests that bullying has not increased, but he only refers to reports about what is documented in schools. Despite acknowledging the technology young people have access to, he completely ignores the significant impact that cyberbullying now has on young people. Last year, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project found that nine out of ten have witnessed the cyberbullying of their peers. A similar Associated Press-MTV poll found that about half of young people regularly encounter discriminatory slang in their online communications, and 54 percent of them think it’s okay to use such language in their circle of friends because “I know we don’t mean it.”

In addition, even if in-school bullying is no more severe than when Gillespie grew up, plenty of new studies demonstrate severe long-term consequences from that bullying that implore a better response than just telling young people to tolerate “lower-level harassment.” For example, LGBT youth who are targeted for their identities are 5.6 times more likely to experience mental health challenges as they age, such as depression, suicide attempts, and substance abuse. In fact, one study has shown that anti-gay stigma can lead to suicidal thoughts that last a lifetime.

It’s unsurprising that Gillespie shied away from discussing anti-LGBT bullying, which is where the “supposed crisis” is most exacerbated. According to GLSEN’s climate survey from 2009 (more recent than the data Gillespie cites), nine out of ten LGBT students experience anti-gay harassment at school. A new study released in January found that nearly half of students and teachers in elementary schools even hear language like “that’s so gay” on a regular basis. Instead, Gillespie invoked the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a group that defends the religious free speech of students, often when it is anti-gay in nature. In other words, he’d rather highlight the work of those defending the bullies than those defending their victims.

Regardless of whether bullying is better or worse than in years past, it’s a significant problem. To trivialize its impact is to discount the real consequences its victims face.

The suicide of 14-year-old Jamey Rodemeyer has moved Lady Gaga to confront President Obama about bringing an end to the anti-gay bullying that led the young “It Gets Better” video-maker to take his own life. But the cyberbullying that Rodemeyer faced is not only prevalent, but the young people perpetuating it do not even realize the harm they are causing. A new Associated Press-MTV poll found that half of young people regularly encounter discriminatory slang in online communications, and most say they aren’t very offended by it. In fact, young people are twice as likely to suggest that biased slurs are used “to be funny” or “to sound cool” than to actually express hateful feelings toward a group of people.

Perhaps more disconcerting is that 54 percent of young people think it’s OK to use discriminatory words within their own circle of friends, because “I know we don’t mean it.” The resulting desensitization is so severe that only 44 percent said they’d be very or extremely offended by someone’s use of the “N-word.” Anti-gay rhetoric is particularly common, with two-thirds of respondents indicating they regularly hear “that’s so gay” used to demean something, and most aren’t offended by it. Even among young people who are gay or know someone who is, only 39 percent are seriously offended by the use of “fag” — the number dips to 23 percent for all others.

But Rodemeyer’s mother, Tracy Rodemeyer, indicates that that is exactly the kind of cyberbullying that Jamey experienced, as he shared in his video and on his blog. As she told Anderson Cooper last night, almost all of the harassment he faced leading up to his death took place online:

RODEMEYER: If you look into his life he did [his "It Gets Better" video] in May, and from May to June, at the end of school there, everything seemed fine. And if we didn’t have all these social networks out there — the Facebook, you know, and the Internet in general — that is where a lot of the bullying occurs. I mean, so he wasn’t in school for the months of July and August. Twenty years ago, that would have probably meant you didn’t have to worry about bullying, but because people can access each other in numbers so readily, it just made it still accessible for people to do their bullying.

Watch it: