Not at all. You misrepresent my point. The point is that these are specifically “hot button” topics because no one is ever ‘right’: it’s a question of ethics and personal beliefs. I doubt many parents are going to encourage someone with beliefs contrary to theirs to (whatever they may be) to stand on their soapbox and try to convince their children they are wrong, on the theory that kids should hear all viewpoints. If this was really the case, there would be no need for parental consent for sex ed or any other questionable material (no matter how ‘right’ or ‘wrong’).
The school has a need to be run as a functional business, with the teachers and administrators being alert to potential lawsuits, especially from something that is this easily noticed and averted. This shirt wouldn’t be allowed in any office that I’ve ever worked in, being as blunt and tactless as it is. That isn’t an infringement of your rights, you voluntarily limited those by agreeing to work with the company. Presumably, since she is still a minor, her parents have control over what she wears when she leaves the house; if they want her to fully embrace her right to wear clothes like that it’s fine, it will just come at the cost of her privilege of being able to attend a public school.
It seems like a more effective lesson to be learned in this case is that there is an appropriate time and place to loudly make your opinions known, and that school is not it. Let her set up an after school pro-life group or stand outside of planned parenthood all she wants. If she (or her parents) wants to recieve her public education, she needs to leave all that at home and come prepared to learn, not prepared to preach. Wrong venue.
And that is the very reason why we must expose children to divergent views, with or without parental consent. Ignorance, superstition, hate, and religion (funny how often all these things tend to occur simultaneously…) are promulgated generation after generation because parents are allowed to hand down their prejudice under our noses and it is protected as sacrosanct. Let us save the children from another generation of stupidity and allow them to at least know of the existence of other views than their parents’.
I volunteer every year at a certain outdoor sporting event when I have ready access to children. I have found over the years that they are extremely open to anarchism as a political philosophy, and often spend many hours answering their questions and challenging the beliefs they have been told to espouse. Some of these kids are now regulars at protests I have attended, and are involved in various forms of activism. They may well have ended up there on their own, but I like to think I am responsible for at least showing them that other ideas exist.
Once, I got a visit from a very angry father who demanded to know if I had told his kid not to listen to him. Turns out, the father had ordered the kid to clean his room and the kid replied, “I don’t have to listen to you, the guy at the shack says I’m an anarchist!” I was much amused, but I really think the dad might have taken a poke at me if I wasn’t 6’5". I spent some time explaining to the father what I had actually said, and suggested that he try negotiation and explaining to his son that anarchism is about personal responsibility; he need not clean his room, but then he should not then expect to have his meals cooked for him or his laundry washed for him. The guy went away mollified, and I think it probably turned out to be a positive experience for all involved in the end.
A school is not a “business,” and conflating education with profit motive is one of the more offensive propositions I’ve read on these boards.
Yes… but I’d doubt they’d win… (well… you never know… crazy lawsuits have been filed and won before)…
If I’m fined for parking in a no parking zone, can I sue the city for violation of the First Amendment rights??? (im aussie, so I haven’t read into US law - enlighten me)
See, we don’t disagree whether some parents dislike it. We disagree whether that mere dislike ought to operate to shut down other speakers. Indeed, we probably even disagree whether it is “regrettable” that the First Amendment requires this conclusion. You’d probably say, “It’s too bad people can use their speech rights in this way,” whereas I’m more in the “Exposure to multiple viewpoints will have the effect of minimizing the transmission of socially harmful viewpoints across generations” camp.
Public schools are government institutions, they must comply with Constitutional restrictions on their operations, including the strictures of the First Amendment. Private businesses do not. Also, it is not a privilege to attend public school. They are funded at the public’s expense, and moreover, school attendance is compelled by law. The government certainly cannot say “Give up your First Amendment rights and go to public school or pay thousands of dollars in private school tuition and retain them.”
There is such a thing as forum analysis, but the thumb is on the scale toward finding a public location to be a public forum or a limited public forum. First Amendment jurisprudence always requires that purpose-based restrictions on speech be tailored as narrowly as possible. That is, the restriction must be the most minimal one devisable that still allows the institution’s purpose to be carried out. The onus is on those who would ban the tee-shirt to show, by more than mere conclusory statements, that it will engender a substantial and material disruption to school activities. Notably, the contention that the shirt will cause discussion, perhaps even heated discussion, of a controversial issue has been rejected by the courts as meeting this high burden.
On preview:MarcinCiez they have sued and won, way back in 1969. It was a case called Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District. This case has been brought up repeatedly in this thread already. I’d suggest you familiarize yourself with it if you wish to participate meaningfully in this discussion.
Allow me to “concur in part and dissent in part.” as the SCOTUS guys say. We (the adult people) do place appropriate limitations on children appropriate to their level of maturity. (I have here in this house a 14-year-old wondering why he can’t go out after 1 AM when his older friends can :)) These powers do not exist in a vacuum; they are exercised by the custodial adult responsible for providing care and upbringing to the child. There is a distinction between what a custodial adult may do an what any random government agent may do. (I may ground my child; Pastor Jerkwell of the Bible Church may not ground my child, nor may the crossing guard.)
A school has the same right to impose time, place, and manner regulations as any other government agency – and perhaps slightly more, since they have a temporary in loco parentis role as regards their student population during school hours. But a public school, as a government agency, may not delimit what views a student may hold, nor which ones they may voice – except as an overall rule not limited to content. (“Absolutely no slogans on T-shirts” is permissible; “No T-shirts with slogans advocating gay rights/Christianity/anti-abortion laws/etc.” is not.) Students’ First Amendment rights, like anyone else’s, may be regulated on reasonable-man standards – just as you may not stand up in a movie theater and make a speech about your pet issue, a student may be restricted from speaking in a classroom setting. However, the content of what he or she may be permitted to say, at times and places where such regulation is inappropriate, cannot be restricted by the government body.
Allow me to also to dissent in part from your post, Polycarp.
The courts have actually rejected the school’s common law role as in loco parentis. It is that doctrine that Clarence Thomas wants to revive, so that schools can do things like strip-search children. While schools are given constitutional leeway because of their peculiar context (and because children in general have more restricted rights), it is not because school officials act under in loco parentis.
It also isn’t clear (to me, at least) that the kind of t-shirt regulation you propose, content-neutral limit on slogans, would be permissible. A t-shirt slogan is one of the only outlets for speech a student has in school. If the school in Tinker had banned all armbands, not just black ones, I’m not sure they would have extricated themselves from constitutional trouble. Do you know of case law on that kind of blanket ban on expressive clothing?
Finally, First Amendment rights are most assuredly not subject to reasonable man or reasonableness standards (like, say, negligence or even Fourth Amendment rights). They are subject to the more narrow category of reasonable, content-neutral, time/place/manner restrictions, and even those restrictions must meet a number of other hurdles. Among them is the requirement of alternative avenues of expression. Denying any expressive clothing may not permit alternative expression by students in school.
Public school administrators principals, et al, have no expectations of cooperation or respect or safety from assassination attempts from students, either, insofar as the students are there involuntarily.
Students SHOULD be granted the rights of citizens, the right to free speech, press, association, freedom from unreasonable or unprovoked search & seizure, and so forth on school grounds simply because these stem from absolute rights (Jefferson’s life, liberty & pursuit of happiness) and it is an environment that, UNLIKE a private club etc etc, is a venue that the students have not chosen to embed themselves in. It’s where they live.
I’m totally (almost militantly) pro-choice but that student should be allowed to wear that shirt. It’s completely in good taste. Nothing gross & icky about it. Conveys its sentiment effectively.
Good thing for you you’ll never get close to my kids, you might find your being 6’5" wasn’t enough to go around pokelessly.
Of course you provide the best example of want you’re saying is wrong, you take kids and instill them YOUR OWN personal views, your ignirance, your superstition (it’s nice how people who claim to fight agaisnt them end up being hard to tell apart from their “enemies”)
I’m glad you’re reasonable enough to concede what must be conceded.
And that’s fine. But this isn’t about what I would expose to your child. It’s what someone, anyone, might. And as far as the law goes, barring locking the child away, there’s nothing you can do about it. The law says exactly which you argue isn’t okay: it is not only okay for someone to do this, there is nothing which can be done to prevent it.
No, it’s really about the law irrespective of how you want to change the subject.
Actually, that’s the very definition of what makes it okay to do; that it’s legal. But your issue is about morality, which isn’t relevant. I don’t reject your argument about the moral implications, but that’s not the topic of this thread, so I do reject that it’s relevant. Thus, I needn’t consider the position at all.
Then you would be wrong. I certainly welcome for my children alternative points of view. It gives them a chance to analyze the situation for themselves. While I would, of course, restrict the form the information takes, I certainly won’t restrict the idea itself.
It does my children a disservice to force upon them my views of the world. For instance, I’m an atheist and my children are all Christian. We have lively discussions about this, as well. I just gear it to an appropriate level of thought for their ages and intellectual abilities.
An office at a private business, as it might have escaped your notice, isn’t a public facility which is specifically excluded from stripping someone of their fundamental rights. Private business have always enjoyed more freedom to censor their workers than the government has its citizens.
Yes, she yelled so loudly that it took reading her shirt to hear it. There’s no good reason to think she was preaching considering, well, she wasn’t. Or is wearing a biblical quote on one’s shirt also preaching?
While I’m an atheist, as I said, I would be all up on anyone who tried to restrict someone’s right to wear on a shirt something that appropriately indicates their position on the subject, or any subject. This girl is within her rights. The shirt wasn’t profane. It wasn’t indecent. It did not substantially disrupt the function of the school, or its classes. In short, she wore on her shirt a protected form of speech which indicates her views on a highly relevant area of public concern. Good for her.
I’m sorry, it sounds almost as if you’re afraid that your child might hear something and, of all things, think about it. If your child is reasonable, and you’ve done a good job getting them as much education as possible, why the lack of confidence in their ability to reason it through according to their own mind?
Of course, children have parents for a reason: to protect them, sometimes against themselves. But, to me, you sound more like you prefer indoctrination of your children so as to minimize the amount of information they’re allowed to think about.
It is a school. It is not a park. We have already established that the SCOTUS agrees a school is not quite as open to free speech as would, say, a park be. Willing to bet if a kid was regaling other kids daily in the playground on how worthless black people are they’d be stopped by the school.
This started as a response to your response to Dangerosa where morals/ethics were brought up. Nice try though.
This reads rather like the apocryphal case of the judge who threw out a case involving smoking on the subway, because the sign read “NO SMOKING ALLOWED”. The judge said the sign allowed you not to smoke if you wanted to.
Yes, and within the confines of that school, students aren’t at the complete mercy of the staff. So much so that they still retain a considerable degree of freedom of speech. So much so that thwarting it is actually illegal.
That it’s a school isn’t in question. That this student had every right to wear that particular shirt isn’t in question. She had the right; her rights were violated.
Okay? Not so much. I asked her a question to point out the absurdity of her claim, which I tied into the conversation directly by saying that she wants schools (remember this is about schools) merely parroting her ideas to the exclusion of others. Perhaps to make it more clear, I could append to that, “the exclusive of everyone else [in stark contrast to that which is required by law].”
My question to her was specifically that it’s ethically wrong for someone . . . But it was within the context of this discussion. How you managed to read this discussion right out of the conversation about this discussion I do not know. Particularly since I tied it directly into the conversation so as to avoid ambiguity.
Really? I didn’t think a court had heard this case yet. You should write them and tell them they can save their time since you know the answer they themselves do not know yet.
SCOTUS allows for freedom of speech restrictions in schools if that speech is disruptive to the task of the school. It will be for a court to decide if her t-shirt constituted disruptive speech. They stopped the girl before there was much opportunity to disrupt anything so I suppose they will have to guess at that. Certainly abortion is a deeply contentious debate in our society. Hard to see how it couldn’t be a disruptive force in a school except to say most of the kids there are too young to have much of an opinion one way or another.
You got it all wrong. I’m not afraid of the general, normal stuff my kids hear that I would have prefered they’d have heard in another manner.
I do not want people specifically indoctrinating my kids with their ideas when it is not part of their job and they say they’ll do it regardless of what I think.
So, a t-shirt supporting one person’s view of the issue is somehow aggrandized to indoctrination? For that to be the case, you must have some very, very credulous children.
Um, okay. Should I impose upon you the same ridiculous standard of predicting the future absolutely? No, I think not. However, current law is quite clear.
You have misstated the law, and even if your understanding were correct, there’s been no assertion that her shirt did actually disrupt the school. However, the standard announced in Tinker is “substantial” disruption. Perhaps you’d do well to read the decision so that you can offer up better reasoned arguments based not on what you keep wrongly maintaining the standard is, but rather on what the actual standard is.