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.”

Bill O’Reilly’s producers were setting up the car pickup and hair and makeup for me (yes, I get the star treatment when I appear on Fox), when they stopped to ask me why I disagreed with O’Reilly about a chastity ring with biblical verse being religious in nature.

You see, a girl in London was not allowed a religious exemption from their uniform policy of “no jewelry” in school. The English court held that the chastity ring was not a religious symbol. The ring was part of the Silver Ring Thing program, which your tax dollars have previously supported to the tune of over a million dollars. Yes, our Congress paid for this religious proselytizing in U.S. public schools, until they agreed to stop such funding after a challenge from the ACLU. Like many other abstinence-until-marriage sex ed programs, this one was theologically based.

When I explained that I agreed with the ACLU and not the London court, I was told they would need to bump me in favor of a guest who would argue that the ring was not religious. But I wonder if it gives Bill O’Reilly pause to note that on this specific part of the issue, he is on the side of the ACLU and the Secular Coalition for America.

When is sex ed really Bible study? Only a few years ago, certain federally funded abstinence-only courses were discovered to have, in their curriculum materials, bible quotes requiring girls to be subservient to their husbands. Even without the quotes, federally funded abstinence-only courses are still telling all students that the only way to express one’s sexuality is to remain abstinent until they marry someone of another gender. Regardless of your individual feelings about this teaching, it is a theological requirement, not the factual basis of a health class or sex education.

Sure, comprehensive sex ed will always include the positive aspects of abstinence–it is the only foolproof way to avoid unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases—but including that along with other factual information is a lot different than preaching abstinence-until-marriage as the only way to deal with one’s sexuality. And it certainly does nothing for the approximately 10% of students who are likely to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender except make them even more invisible and discounted than they already are in our society.

It’s not that sex isn’t always on my mind, but this has been an especially “hot” subject in Congress this particular week, as the House Appropriations Committee gets set to vote on how much money to throw at these abstinence-only programs.