If said speech is about the repression and/or hatred of another person or group of people based on racial, religious or sexual orientation, then said speech should not qualify for protection.
Then I guess denying a child the opportunity to express that a toy has a sexual preference isn’t a constitutional issue either.
Marc
You are advocating,among other things, that the Constitution of the United States of America be stripped of the protection of the Constitution of the United States of America.
You are an idiot.
It is unpopular speech that needs the most protection.
Marc
can you not tell the difference between unpopular speech and hate speech?
Is a t-shirt that says “Straight Pride” unpopular speech or hate speech?
It would depend on the users reasons for wearing it.
Correct.
What is the point? I consider the forbidding of hate slogans, expressions of sexuality, and intolerance all to be acceptable within the confines of a school - though to be fair, I find expressions of sexuality much less dangerous than the other two examples.
Why must this somehow be a first amendment issue? You realize there are metric tons of law interpreting and clarifying our constitutional rights.
It doesn’t matter. Whether the speech is hateful or not it should be equally protected. What good is free speech if we only protect what we like?
Marc
Perhaps you could describe a method whereby we could objectively determine one from the other.
I know what I think is hateful. It only sometimes intersects with what others think is hateful.
Hold the phone. When did we agree that certain kinds of speech were prohibited? Hate speech is bad, wrong, nasty, and icky, but it’s still speech, and it doesn’t hurt anyone. More to the point, it doesn’t cause disruptions unless other people choose to react to it.
Does it cross no one’s mind but mine that the best way to discourage both the neo-nazi and the T-shirt wearer is to simply ignore them? That the mere act of responding is letting them know that their message is worth your time?
Um… Sure… Schmuck…
:rolleyes:
from http://www.jhuccp.org/pr/l12/l12profile.pdf
http://www.ccsd.ca/pubs/archive/pcc98/pr.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/883501.stm
http://www.mainelygirls.org/reports/whoweare.html
http://www.skettel.com/pires/published/1999/99-aug-07.html
http://channel955.com/mojo_teensex.html
Gee. And that only took me 10 minutes with Google.
Drag your head out of the sand and don’t let it get lodged in your ass on the way up.
Just looking around our society, if you have any contact with teens and pre-teens, it is very clear that they are more sexual and sexualized than in generations past.
I was a teen of the 1980s, and next to the teens of today, I feel like my peers and I were in a Leave It To Beaver(so not an intentional pun) mode more than in Dawson’s Creek.
There were some who were sexually active, but it wasn’t common.
Working at a store that had a great deal of teen patronage, I was often privy to their conversations. The discussions I heard and overheard about sex was different for the most part from when I was a teenager. These kids knew what they were talking about and were very aware of technique, even if they did seem to ignore any ramification outside of pregnancy.
Swastikas are only a symbol. The real problem is the hatred. You can’t legislate hatred; all you can do is try to curb the expression of it. Now before anyone cries, “But they have a right to express their hatred!”, no, not in a high school setting, I don’t think they do. High schools have become far too much the microcosms of the world than the places of learning that they should be. If kids want to express their hatred, I respectfully suggest they join a hate group, not a local high school. And I never thought I would say that until this year; after having taught in England, where schools are for learning, I’ve seen the difference it makes.
Thanks for backing me up, but I’ll have to disagree with this one. I expect students to express themselves…with their brains, classwork, and verbal abilities.
And fair play, Homebrew, I don’t find the t-shirt offensive. My post should have read, "The girl wears a shirt that is offensive to some. Those some would be people who find lesbianism to be offensive.
From the perspective of the Constitution of the United States of America, there is no difference. Both are equally protected.
It’s a bit of an old saw that the solution to “bad speech” is more speech. The answer is not to repress speech or oppress speakers. The idea that you think one should fight “fascism” by suppressing speech would be laughable, if it weren’t so sickening.
So we agree that hair (or lack thereof) is not a disruption?
If the law gave them that choice, I’m sure some of them would choose to do just that. But as long as kids are required to be in school, the government must give them the same rights as everyone else.
No doubt there are some people who are simply offended because they don’t like homosexuality. However I’m not offended by homosexuality and I find the shirt to be in poor taste. That kind of shoots down that theory doesn’t it?
I suppose if this shirt isn’t a big deal then what about others? Can another student wear a shirt that says “Martin Luther King, Jr. was an Adulterer?” Only people who are offended by the truth would be offended by this shirt. Nevermind that it would be in extremely poor taste.
I think we could all argue that any given shirt would only cause a ruckus if somone decided to make one. If it makes one, regardless of why, I don’t see why the school can’t tell students not to wear it.
Marc
Absolutely.
I don’t see why the school can’t punish the students who actually cause the ruckus instead of the one wearing the shirt.
Because she’s wearing the shirt with the intention of causing a ruckus. Which do you think is more likely…that she’s wearing the shirt to express her thought out views of Barbie’s sexuality, or that she’s wearing the shirt with the intention of provoking people and getting them to notice her?
This isn’t a free speech issue any more than sending home a kid who comes into the school naked is a free speech issue. In both cases, the way the child is dressed is such that students will pay attention to him or her to the detriment of the learning process.
It’s true that students do have the constitutional right to express what they believe, either by actual or symbolic speech, but they don’t have the right to disrupt the learning process.
The point of dress codes that restrict such things as hate speech, gang colors, expressions of sexuality, etc. is to prevent disruptions from happening in the first place. The best way to prevent disruptions is to intervene at the earliest moment, when the potential for disruption is detected. Preventing problems is almost always preferable to meting out punishment afterwards.
We’re missing a lot of informtion about what exactly happened that we’d need to make a fair judgement here:
Does the school have a dress code?
If so, what exactly does it say, what types of clothing are banned, and what is the proscribed consequence for violation of these rules?
How consistently does the school enforce such rules? Have other students been instructed not to wear t-shirts with expressions of sexuality on them?
The article says the girl was held in the office for three hours then suspended for the rest of the day. What happened while she was held in the office? Was she given the option to change/turn the shirt inside out/cover it up/go home and change? If she was given this option, how did she respond? Did she further aggravate the situation while in the office through some further behavior?
Was this part of a pattern of insubbordinate behavior on the part of the girl, or was it a first offense? Has the girl been sexually forward with other girls?
Are there any other students who are openly homosexual? How does the school deal with these?
What is the school culture as it relates to openly gay students? How likely was the shirt to have provoked a disruptive response in other students?
Depending on the answers to these questions, I might come down on the girl’s side, the school’s side, or somewhere in the middle. As it stands, I don’t have enough information to make anything resembling an informed judgement.
Sorry, but it doesn’t strike me asparticularly relevant to the case at hand what the student may or may not have done before, whether there are other openly gay students in the school or what have you. The question is, does the Constitution protect this student’s right to wear this shirt? Based on the Tinker decision my opinion is yes, it does. Which means the school was 100% wrong to suspend her and violated the student’s civil rights.