From Beagledave’s link and quote from the article on the Tinker decision:
The girl’s previous behavior and the reaction of other students to that behavior would factor into the administration’s “reasonable belief that a ‘substantial disruption or material interference with school activities’” might ensue from this behavior. My guess is that it’s unlikely to cause a disruption, and that the school overreacted in this particular case, but we don’t know what’s happened in this particular school in this case before this incident, and have only the girl’s side from the article.
Likewise, the treatment of other openly gay students is relevant. If the administration has the habit of singling out gay students for scrutiny when it comes to their clothing, this would be evidence that this girl has been unfairly targeted. If the administration has consistently demonstrated tolerance and support for other openly gay students who had been persecuted, this would support the idea that it wasn’t the message–which is certainly constitutionally protected–but the likelihood of disruption resulting from her wearing the shirt that was the cause of her treatment. I think the former is more likely than the latter, but we don’t know either way.
I’m still going to reserve judgement until I have a lot more information than a short, single article that supplies us with only one side of the story.
Mockingbird writes: “Teen pregancy rates are increasing.”
Not true, at least in the U.S. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, teen pregnacy rates were at a record low in 2001, having fallen for the tenth straight year.
There had been a rise in the 1980’s (maybe it wasn’t so quaint a time as you remember it to be), but that rise was followed by a decline in the 1990’s.
Getting people to notice her is not the same as being disruptive.
It’s a false dilemma to begin with. She could have worn the shirt because she thought it was funny, or wanted to make a statement about her personality.
I have a Napster shirt that I wear once in a while. Do I wear it to provoke the RIAA, or to express my well thought out views on copyrights? No, I wear it because it’s a cool logo, it’s somewhat of a collector’s item, and it shows that I was there when file sharing became an issue. If someone gets upset by it and wants to start a fight, that’s his problem, not mine.
How, exactly, does a shirt that says “Barbie is a lesbian” disrupt the learning process? We’ve heard this claim over and over, but no one has pointed to a single case where students were unable to focus on class simply because they were in the same room as a certain shirt.
Do you often find yourself unable to concentrate when someone walks in the room sporting a message you disagree with?
They are both forms of speech and when you’re talking about a society that protects free speech it doesn’t matter what the actual content is. This is the US we’re talking about not countries like France or Holland whom have laws against pro Nazi speech.
A protest against parking tickets = a white pride march in the eyes of the law AFAIK in the US.
I’d say that either the school should ban all form of t-shirts with messages on them or allow all. By allowing all they should be prepared for kids to push the envelope. As with the UK, Irish schools generally have uniforms so this doesn’t really come up here as the only statement you can make is tieing your tie in a different knot etc. I preferred the double Windsor
