How Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity campaign encourages bullying

While a few conservatives — notably New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie — have voiced their support for Michelle Obama's anti-obesity campaign, Let's Move, many on the right, including Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh, have mocked it. And no wonder, says Paul Campos, a University of Colorado law professor, writing at The Daily Beast. Campos, a self-proclaimed liberal, says the First Lady's anti-obesity campaign is "is like a Tea Partier's fever dream of wrongheaded government activism," rooted in bad science and false logic. Worse, it leaves overweight kids even more vulnerable to ridicule. Here, an excerpt:

And none of this even touches on a subtler and more invidious cost to the Let's Move campaign: The profound shaming and stigmatization of fat children that is an inevitable product of the campaign's absurd premise that the bodies of heavier than average children are by definition defective, and that this "defect" can be cured through lifestyle changes... Fat kids have enough problems without the additional burden of being subjected to government-approved pseudo-scientific garbage about how they could be thin if they just ate their vegetables and played outside more often.

Michelle Obama's campaign against childhood obesity is exactly the sort of crusade that liberals who don't want to give ammunition to conservative critiques of government activism should oppose. It is a deeply misguided attempt to solve an imaginary health crisis by employing unnecessary cures that in any case don't work. As such, it is almost a parody of activist government at its most clueless.

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Read the whole article at The Daily Beast.