Box Turtle Bulletin

Texas Eighth-Grader Told To Change Her Pro-Gay T-Shirt Or Go Home

Ali Chaney, 13, wore her shirt to SC Lee Junior High in Copperas Cove, Texas on Monday. The shirt, in rainbow colors, said, “Some people are gay. Get over it.” That message got the eighth-grader, who is gay herself, in trouble.

“I was upset,” she told KCEN-TV. “I mean, when they said that they don’t want that in their school, I was like, you don’t want what in your school? You don’t want gay kids in your school? … The main principal was, like, it’s nothing against you, we just don’t want that so you need to change your shirt.” Ali refused and was sent home.

The Copperas Cove Independent School District released a statement saying: “Our purpose at CCISD is to educate children, first and foremost. According to CCISD’s dress code in the student handbook and code of conduct, clothing that is disruptive to the learning environment based on reactions by other students is prohibited. The student was offered a school shirt to wear and declined.”

“IslamOBAMunist Threatens Your Freedom”

The school claimed it enforces its dress code equally, and provided a photo of another shirt that it asked a student to change. But Ali refuted that by providing a photo of a student wearing a T-shirt which suggested that President Obama was a Muslim Communist who “threatens your freedom.” That student was not asked to change shirts.

Ali’s mother filed a complaint with the district.

McKinney school district defends “Gay O.K.” t-shirts

Last week we told you of school administrators at Faubian Middle School in McKinney, Texas who disciplined some students wearing “Gay O.K.” t-shirts and then blamed them for the resulting fracas. Now district officials have defended the girls’ right to stand up for fellow gay students. (Buzzfeed)

“We told the campus administration that they should not have asked the students to take off the shirts, or change shirts,” Cody Cunningham, the chief spokesman for McKinney Independent School District, told BuzzFeed News. “We told them that students have every right to wear the shirts.”

Also coming out are further details about the events leading up to the display of support.

The problem began in May, Heiman said, when a seventh grade girl came out as bisexual and a group of boys began harassing her.

“They kept saying rude things to her in the hallways. They would call her ‘dyke’ or ‘fag,'” Heiman said. Even after some of the girls asked the boys to stop, one boy persisted, she added.

When a friend approached the boy in the cafeteria at lunch and asked him to stop, the two took their disagreement to a vice principal, Robert Waite. Heiman said she watched the exchange, in which Waite did not take any action against the boy, but instead mocked the girl to another school staffer, reportedly saying, “This girl’s in charge of school bullying.”

Heiman said Waite made the girl who reported the bullying sit down.

The administrators at Faubian did not inform the district that there had been any bullying at the school. Now an investigation has been initiated.

Texas school administrators cause fracas, blame pro-gay students

A Faubian Middle School in McKinney, Texas, a seventh grade student came out as gay and was subsequently bullied. Several girls in the school decided to take a stance in support of that student.

On the next-to-last day of school about fifteen students wore t-shirts blazed with the message: “Gay O.K.”. But this message was not acceptable to the administrators. (nbcdfw)

“We were doing perfectly fine until lunch,” said Sammy Heiman, a seventh grader who designed the shirts. “And then [the administration] called us all out, all the people wearing them, called us out of the cafeteria.”

And that’s when things got rowdy. The other students in the cafeteria saw what was going on and that the students were being told not to wear the shirts and started chanting “Gay O.K.” One student not wearing the shirt argued with an administrator and knocked a cell phone from their hand.

So, having caused a fracas by forcing the girls to change, the administrators are claiming that they banned the shirts only because they were disruptive.

“In this particular case, a verbal disruption occurred between a large number of students in the cafeteria as a result of the shirts,” said Cody Cunningham, spokesman for the McKinney Independent School District. “This was not a civil debate, but rather yelling and shouting, and [it] alarmed a large number of students.”

“While we respect student free speech, our primary obligation is to ensure a safe and productive learning environment for students in McKinney ISD,” Cunningham added.

See, your shirts caused a disruption when we took away your First Amendment rights.

And, in the worst possible reporting of an event ever, the local news is echoing the administration. “… they were not concerned about what that shirt said, just the results you saw there”.

Of course, there were no “results” until after the administrators called the girls out of the auditorium. So that’s simply a falsehood.

T-Shirt Wars: A Temporary Victory for the Mean Spirited

Alexander Nuxoll sued his school district in order to be allowed to wear the slogan “Be Happy, Not Gay” on a t-shirt on the Day of Silence. Twice now courts have upheld the school’s right to ban insulting and discriminatory messages.

But now the Naperville Sun is reporting that appeals Judge Richard Posner has validated Nuxoll’s right to wear his message of condemnation – at least until he has his day in court.

But on Wednesday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit reversed the lower courts’ rulings against Nuxoll, saying the district court must order Neuqua to suspend its ban on the shirt while the civil rights lawsuit filed by Nuxoll and Neuqua grad Heidi Zamecnik proceeds.

“We cannot accept the defendants’ argument that the rule is valid because all it does is protect the ‘rights’ of the students against whom derogatory comments are directed,” states the court’s opinion, authored by Judge Richard Posner. “Of course a school can – often it must – protect students from the invasion of their legal rights by other students. But people do not have a legal right to prevent criticism of their beliefs or for that matter their way of life.”

Now that everyone can wear “criticism of beliefs” on their t-shirts, I wonder how Nuxoll would feel if he showed up to his class on the “Day of Truth” and found that all of his other classmates were wearing t-shirts that criticized his beliefs. But I don’t recommend that… it wouldn’t be the way I’d want to be treated.

See also:
T-Shirt Wars: Appeals
Arizona House Passes Bigot Protection Act
Anti-Gay T-Shirt Wars

T-Shirt Wars: Appeals

For some reason, some culture warriors believe it is their Christian duty to condemn gay people. One favorite method is through T-Shirts in public schools.

Heidi Zamecnik, 17, of Naperville, and Alexander Nuxoll, 14, of Bollingbrook, are students at Neuqua Valley High School in Naperville.

In response to a National Day of Silence event in April 2006, Zamecnik wore a shirt to school that read “MY DAY OF SILENCE, STRAIGHT ALLIANCE” on the front and “BE HAPPY, NOT GAY” on the back

She was told that she could wear a t-shirt that supported heterosexuality, such as “Be Happy, Be Straight”, but that she could not wear one that denied the happiness of fellow gay students.

But oh no, Zamecnik and her straight alliance don’t want to promote a pro-straight message, just an anti-gay one. Zamecnik has graduated and thus lost standing, but Mr. Nuxoll has stepped in the battle on. He, too, would like to express his contempt.

And the ever eager ADF, of course, is fighting for Nuxoll’s right to be obnoxious.

“Christian students shouldn’t be discriminated against for expressing their beliefs,” attorney Nate Kellum said in a statement Friday.

I’m assuming that “their beliefs” could also include their contempt of other religions or other sects as well, but Kellum didn’t talk about that.

The anti-gays lost the first round but appealed.

A three-judge panel heard testimony Friday in a Naperville high school student’s appeal to wear a T-shirt expressing opposition to homosexuality.

Young Nuxoll is hoping a decision is made in time for him to wear his neighbor-condemning shirt on the Day of Silence, April 28.

Sometimes I wonder if the ADF isn’t secretly an anti-Christian organization dedicated to making those who practice the faith look like a bunch of hate-full buffoons. They certainly are having that effect on youth.

See also:

Arizona House Passes Bigot Protection Act
Anti-Gay T-Shirt Wars

Anti-Gay T-Shirt Wars

The Alliance Defense Fund is a legal arm of the social conservative movement. They are also the founders and promoters of the Day of Truth, an effort on school campuses to “counter the promotion of the homosexual agenda”. The DOT grew out of efforts to oppose the Day of Silence, a program by gay students and their friends and allies to bring attention to how heterosexism and homophobia silence the voices of the LGBT minority.

The Day of Truth walks a careful line. While they talk about “tolerance for opposing viewpoints” (their anti-gay viewpoints, primarily) and claim that there is “freedom to change”, they stop short of outright attacks on gay students.

But this is not because they want to avoid such attacks. Indeed, the Alliance Defense Fund would like little more than to teach hostility to homosexuality and silence anyone who disagrees. But school boards have restricted the ability of anti-gay students to publicly condemn their fellow students.

ADF is not happy.

They sued.

The best known of these cases is that of Tyler Chase Harper. Young Mr. Harper wore a T-Shirt to his school in the Poway Unified School District in response to the 2004 Day of Silence. His eloquent message was Homosexuality Is Shameful, Romans 1:27″. That didn’t get Harper enough attention, so the next day he ratcheted up his message to “Be Ashamed” and “Our School Embraced What God Has Condemned.”

On the second day, school administrators told him that he could not wear a message that was overtly hostile to other students and asked him to remove the statement – which had been added to his plain black T-Shirt with masking tape. Harper refuse and, with the help of ADF, sued his school. (One can’t help but wonder what Harper would have worn the next day if this message did not get his desired result).

The judge found that Harper did not have a case. ADF appealed.

In 2006, a three judge appeals panel found that “the school is permitted to prohibit Harper’s conduct…if it can demonstrate that the restriction was necessary to prevent either the violation of the rights of other students or substantial disruption of school activities.” But they did not rule on the case itself.

In August 2006, the Ninth Circuit appeals court denied en banc review (review by all of the judges). This time the decision was in more direct language.

“Hate speech, whether in the form of a burning cross, or in the form of a call for genocide, or in the form of a tee shirt misusing biblical text to hold gay students to scorn, need not under Supreme Court decisions be given the full protection of the First Amendment in the context of the school environment, where administrators have a duty to protect students from physical or psychological harms.”

In their quest to equate the statement “treat all students with fairness” to “condemn some students based on one’s own religious beliefs”, ADF continued with their lawsuit to overturn restrictions on hostile messages in an environment in which attendance is compulsory. But by the time that the case made its way to the US Supreme Court, Chase Harper graduated and the decision was moot.

However Chase Harper’s little sister Kelsie discovered that she too had a burning drive to condemn her fellow students and the lawsuit was transferred to her.

ADF asked the judge to reconsider his ruling throwing out the case. U.S. District Judge John Houston issued his ruling today. Not surprisingly, he hadn’t changed his mind.

He wrote that a school “interest in protecting homosexual students from harassment is a legitimate pedagogical concern that allows a school to restrict speech expressing damaging statements about sexual orientation and limiting students to expressing their views in a positive manner.”

Interestingly, the ADL is supported by that organization most hated by social conservatives, the American Civil Liberties Union.

David Blair-Loy, legal director for the ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties, said the case is troubling. The ACLU filed a brief in support of Harper’s speech rights – siding with the religious groups that they are often at odds with.

“This theory is a novel and extreme expansion of a school’s rights to limit speech,” Blair-Loy said. Schools potentially could ban any speech they say is “psychologically damaging.”

“And let’s face it: What about high school is not psychologically damaging?” Blair-Loy said. “This student wore a T-shirt that expressed an idea. It’s an idea we don’t agree with at the ACLU, but that is the essence of free speech. It’s not just for ideas you like.”

In the midst of this battle in the Great American Culture War Against Gay People, I think something is being forgotten by both sides. Any ruling that allows social conservatives to attack gay people… also allows other students to attack religion.

If messages are allowed that condemn homosexuality on religious terms, then would not messages that condemn religion on terms of orientation be allowed? Surely they could not disallow “Christianity is a Hateful Religion and those who follow it are Homophobes and Bigots”.

And is it then a far reach from “Homosexuality Is Shameful” to “Catholicism is Idolatry” or “Speaking in Tongues is Satanic”? Would Jews be accused of “killing our Savior”? Would a school with a small Muslim minority be force to subject those students to T-Shirts attacking their faith?

This is not without precedent. In 1984 religious activists pushed the Equal Access Act through Congress so as to allow Bible Clubs on school campuses. It said that if a school allows ANY non-curricular organizations to meet, it has to all ALL non-curricular organizations to meet. This is the piece of legislation that protects Gay-Straight Alliances from being banned by homophobic school administrations – a consequence that Bible Club backers did not intend.

I doubt that ADF or those who support them have thought about the eventual results of their efforts. But, then again, this is a great fund raiser for ADF and I doubt they much care. After all, an anti-Christian T-shirt on some campus would give them another lawsuit for which to request funds and issue press releases.