Free Speech Fashion
Recently, St. Louis-area junior high school students Tori Shoemaker and Cheyenne Byrd were suspended for two days because they wore home-made t-shirts that read “safe sex or no sex.” The shirts were decorated with condoms, and were meant to protest the school’s abstinence-only sex education curriculum. The students said their shirts were a form of free speech, but a superintendent said that the shirts were inappropriate and a distraction at school (so, apparently free speech is only permissible when appropriate). Watch the CNN report here.
Haven’t we seen this kind of thing before, with students punished for wearing black armbands to protest the Vietnam war? In 1969 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District that symbolic speech and political expression were protected under the First Amendment. How are Shoemaker and Byrd’s t-shirts any different from those black armbands, to which the 1969 ruling applied? As the Court wrote, “it can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”
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I think the school is probably in the wrong here. As you noted, the Tinker case upheld students’ rights to free speech. My only criticism of the t-shirts, not having seen them, so I may well be wrong, is that the text is protected speech: it’s not vulgar or profane in any way, but perhaps the decorations were not a good touch. Even so, condoms are a fact of life and should not be objectionable either, except that we live in an incredibly prudish society.
I would also say that if this were a private school then the school would have the right to censor what the students wore. If the students did not like the rules they would be free to leave, and take their tuition money with them, and find another school.
As this is a public school then the problem is that it is the government that is prohibiting speech. Since the taxes the government forces the girls’ parents to pay may make it cost prohibitive for the parents to send their girls to private school the government is forcing the girls to go to that school.
Those kids did the right things. good for them standing up for what they believe in. If we were all like that we could get gas prices lowered and force the government to work the way it was founded on.