Back to this one, are we? There was no harassment, and therefore no disruption occuring. The kid in question went for almost a day and a half and no one even noticed his t-shirts.
Disagreeing with someone is not the same as harassing them. If using symbolic speech to express dissent from an opinion is harassment, then the National Day of Silence is harassment.
It is exactly the same as allowing “Bush for President” t-shirts and forbidding “Kerry for President”. It’s content-based censorship. And that is not allowable under the Constitution.
“As vile and hateful as they can”? No. Of course not. There is a difference between criticism and vile hate. “Gay is not OK” is criticism; it is the opposite of “Gay is OK”. “Betty Sue is a really mean girl” and “Betty Sue would be the worst Homecoming Queen” are criticism. “Betty Sue is a filthy whore” is vile hate (assuming that Betty Sue takes showers and doesn’t trade sex for money).
It’s fine to allow criticism while banning vile hate, as long as your definition of vile hate is strict enough that there remains a way to criticize something without being considered a vile hatemonger. If any criticism of a subject is considered hate, then the only way to preserve balance would be to ban praise of that subject as well - which is why it’s wrong to consider any criticism hate.
Proselytizing is not against the law. Claiming that one message on a shirt is more effective at “forcing” anything on anyone than a Day of Silence in which many students participate, on the other hand, is so ridiculous that maybe it should be against the law.
My apologies for any confusion; I neither mentioned nor used my ignore list. In this context, I simply meant that your insulting tone obviates the need for me to respond to your posts in this thread. (I make this single exception to clarify a board-rules issue).
In the future, if you believe I’m violating board rules, I’d appreciate your reporting my post.
Sorry, I’m still not seeing how saying “God doesn’t like this” or “God is gonna get ya” is a threat. No matter how you slice it, I’m just not seeing it.
I think it would be easier if more schools had stricter dress codes or uniforms.
Yes, we’re back to it, because I still think you have it backwards. Can you even consider the possibility that the learning process can be disrupted without a specific event shutting down the school? What if a few kids stop showing up to school because they are tired of being putdown everyday for something they have no control over, and feel hopeless because the administration turns a blind eye to it? The learning process has been disrupted, and no one ever heard a peep.
No, actually no disruption has been demonstrated. As I mentioned, no student gave a rap about the t-shirt, until some oversensitve teacher decided to try to silence the t-shirt wearer because he didn’t like the message.
And the idea that I need to demonstrate an event “shutting down the school” is silly. The National Day of Silence has a much more immediate impact on the learning process, and nobody said boo about that.
If you are going to proactively shut down free speech because someone might be offended and drop out of school, the effort is wasted. If gays and their supporters are such hot-house flowers that they cannot bear to be in the same building as someone who disagrees with them, they aren’t going to be able to operate in American society in the first place.
I have heard no objection that doesn’t boil down to “I don’t like the message - stop it”. Which is not good enough.
“I don’t like being attacked for something I have no control over - stop it” is good enough for me. We’re trying to create a learning environment here, not a safe haven for bullies. But to each his own, I guess.
Who was attacking the school administrators for something they had no control over? Recall that it was the administrators, not the students, who complained about the message.
It was the administrators, not the students, who punished the boy. I have not seen any evidence either way as to whether or not students made any official complaints first, and certainly no evidence that every kid at Poway thought it was A-OK and no one was upset, hurt, or frightened by it at all. If the GLT report is accurate (which is difficult to determine, as apparently no one else has bothered to try to talk to the Poway students about their feelings on the matter), Day of Silence participants had good reason to fear being taunted or assaulted on that day.
Not that it would make a lot of difference in this case if no students complained and all the kids were A-OK with the shirt, because it was a violation of the school’s previously established dress code anyway. The administration doesn’t need to wait for student complaints before it can enforce its own rules.
The fact that the school had pre-existing rules strengthens its case but does not settle it; those pre-existing rules may constitute an unconstitutional infringement upon the student’s free speech rights, similar to a rule that forbade black armbands in protest of a war.
Yes, I know that. I was merely trying to highlight some of the facts in a discussion where almost everyone (and I include myself in this) has gotten carried away making speculation and bold statements about what was and wasn’t allowed at this school and what did and didn’t happen, when about the only thing we can really tell for sure from the news reports is that the boy’s shirt violated the dress code and he was punished accordingly.
It is not my understanding of the First Amendment that it protects the right of this boy to wear a shirt on school grounds during school time proclaiming that God condemns homosexuality, homosexuality is shameful, and anyone who expresses tolerance or sympathy for homosexuals should likewise be ashamed. Considering that I keep being passed by every time an opening on the Supreme Court comes up, my understanding of the Constitution doesn’t count for much – but if I am incorrect and it does value the right to be a bigot or a bully in the public schools over the right to attend public schools without being harassed, then I think the Constitution is wrong. I was subjected to enough of that in school myself (up until I transfered to the high school I described in my previous post), and no one ever worried about the effect this had on my “freedom of expression”. I would prefer to believe that this was the result of insensitivity and ineptness on the part of the administrators at my schools, and not because the principles the United States was founded upon say that it was just fine for other kids to terrorize me on a daily basis and punishing them for it would be a violation of their rights.
And I’m really, really glad I previewed this post carefully. It may still contain errors, but at least I managed to correct “pubic schools” to “public schools”.
The only refutation needed is to point out that wearing a t-shirt disagreeing with someone is a far cry from terrorizing them on a daily basis. One is protected speech; the other is (quite rightly) condemned.
But they are not necessarily connected. It is possible to disagree with someone without threatening them, just as it is possible to disagree with someone without trying to silence their point of view.
What effect did it have? Keep in mind that if folks persuaded you through speech (not through threats of illegal acts they’d commit) not to speak, then they didn’t impinge on your freedom of expression. I know this sounds harsh, but I’m guessing that they shamed you, didn’t coerce you into not expressing yourself, and that’s legal, protected behavior.
After all, I want to be able to shame people into shutting the hell up sometime. If I could figure out how to shame the folks shouting “Murderers!” outside the local abortion clinic, I’d be down there in an instant. And I wouldn’t want them to be able to silence my shaming tactics just because they didn’t like it.
Is it really necessary for me to write out all the unpleasant details? My experiences were not particularly unusual; I’ve seen posts by other SDMB members who had similar ones. But I know I had at least one classmate who was surprised to realize that I actually possessed the power of speech. I also suffer from chronic back pain thanks to years of “bad posture” – that is, years of hunching over in hopes of making myself less noticeable.
Oh, there were threats too, and sporadic violence. But except for the times when things turned to sexual assault, this was in many ways preferable to the near-constant verbal abuse. That was what bothered me most both at the time and in looking back. At least when threats or violence were involved, there was some chance that an authority figure might be persuaded to lift a finger.
For adults. Children and adolescents are different from adults, that’s why the same rules don’t apply to them. It’s pretty easy to tell an adult that they don’t need to listen to what other people say, and indeed it’s pretty easy for an adult to do this. Would it upset me as an adult if I happened to see someone wearing a t-shirt that insulted me or a group that I am a member of? A bit, but I’d gripe about it to a friend or start a Pit thread or something and get over it. That’s partially because as an adult I can get away from such people. I don’t have to enter the lion’s den five days a week. It’s also because as an adult I have enough maturity, life experience, and sense of my own self-worth not to take things like that to heart. I know other people don’t write hurtful things on their t-shirts because there’s something wrong with me, and I know that it’s not me that’s truly “shameful”. These are things that kids don’t necessarily understand. Sadly, they are things that not all kids will ever grow to understand either. For some the wounds run too deep, and a few simply don’t survive. I was lucky enough to get through it, but I was also lucky enough to have things going for me that many kids in similar situations didn’t.
Kids can’t “just deal with it” the way adults can be expected to. They don’t know how. That’s why they need special consideration from adults and an environment where they can feel safe…although they don’t always get it. I wouldn’t wish mockery or abuse upon Shirt Boy; he should be allowed to feel safe too. What he shouldn’t be allowed to do is hurt other students, and I do not limit “hurt” to “physically injure”. I do not believe it did him a bit of harm to be told he wasn’t allowed to wear his shirt at school (although the “leave your religion in the car” remark was out of line), but nothing is going to convince me that by wearing the shirt he wasn’t harming any of his classmates. When students act to hurt one another then it’s the responsibility of the administration to step in.
Looking over my last few posts, I can’t help but conclude that there’s no point in my continuing to participate in this debate. It can’t be a very satisfying discussion for anyone if there’s no stasis point and if there’s no hope of persuading anyone of anything. I don’t know about how married the rest of you are to your positions, but there is no chance I am going to be convinced that abuse or harassment of schoolkids by schoolkids is acceptable as long as it doesn’t actually involve violence (either in reality or by threat) or that school administrators shouldn’t do everything they can to prevent bullying.
Since I cannot be convinced of this, I cannot be convinced that the t-shirt in question was deserving of protection. It is disturbin for me to consider the implications of granting such shirts protection as “free speech”. If we allow “Homosexuality is Shameful” in schools then I don’t see how “No Fat Chicks” could be disallowed, nor “Go Back to Africa”, “Jews Killed Jesus”, or “A Woman’s Place Is On Her Knees”. These are not messages that schools should support and they are not messages that schools should allow to be displayed. Again, I am not going to change my mind about this. I am not going to sell out my young self, my few childhood friends, or the countless bullied kids in the world today by saying they just have to “put up with it” because the First Amendment says other kids have the right to crush their spirits.
I have a good opinion of some of you on the other side of this discussion, and I am afraid that if I continue to participate then I will find myself thinking of you as nothing better than bullies/child abusers-by-proxy. This wouldn’t be fair, as I think most of you are guilty of nothing worse than holding some overly romantic ideas. My apologies to anyone who was interested in further debate with me in this thread, and my thanks to those who have made thoughtful responses to me, but this has become too personally upsetting for me to continue.
Fair enough, Lamia; I don’t want this to become unpleasant for folks to talk about. I will say three final things:
There is bullying in the schools which I would disallow;
I’m not sure where to draw the line, exactly, between protected speech and forbidden bullying; and
I don’t think the notion of protecting free speech in schools is “overly romantic” at all: on the contrary, I remember from my own school days the intense frustration I had when my speech rights were suppressed. I can imagine how much worse it could be in more conservative districts, and for students less privileged than I was.
Also, Lamia, I realize it may have sounded like I was trivializing your high-school experiences. That was not my intent; indeed, there’s a good chance that if I knew specifics I’d consider them to fall firmly on the verboten bullying side of the line. My apologies if my post came across as trivializing.
