Imminent Violence Justifies Halting Political Speech on School Campus?
The US Federal Court of Appeals ruled today that students wearing shirts showing the American flag were properly silenced when high school officials perceived imminent safety risks and demanded that the students leave or turn the shirts inside out to cover the flag. http://patdollard.com/2014/02/9th-u-s-circuit-court-of-appeals-rules-california-school-can-ban-u-s-flag-shirts-during-phony-holiday-cinco-de-mayo/
The setting: Cinco de Mayo celebrations in southern San Francisco, at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hills where hundreds celebrated their Latino heritage. The silenced students: Members of the student body wearing t-shirts that displayed the US flag. The questioned conduct: School officials demanded that the flag wearing students either leave the event or reverse their t-shirts to cover the US flag. The justification offered: Violent histories of gang confrontations in the community arising from pro- and anti-Latino groups led school officials to believe that students wearing US flag shirts to the Latino celebration would cause immediate violent protests and confrontations. http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2014/02/27/11-17858.pdf
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/28/us-usa-court-tshirts-california-idUSBREA1R06R20140228
William Becker, attorney for the students who were silenced, vows to appeal to the US Supreme court, asserting that the right to free political speech was sacrificed in the face of speculations about violence that should have been controllable by law enforcement and school authorities at the gathering. http://www.mercurynews.com/crime-courts/ci_25240543/american-flag-removal-order-justified-u-s-court
Analysts at http://HamiltonFinanceServices.com say the Supreme Court appeal won’t likely make it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedures_of_the_Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States
Nonetheless, the right to free political speech has been upheld by that court in unlikely appeals before. In the Cohen case, for example, a man convicted of wearing a t-shirt with the words “F___ the draft” (see footnote for the blank spot appearing after the letter ‘F’) to a 1971 protest, when the draft rose to high levels of violent controversy, had his conviction over-tuned by the US Supreme Court precisely because political speech deserves exceptional protection under the US Constitution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohen_v._California
The difference in today’s case: Four of the five boys elected to go home when threatened with arrest by school officials, and the fifth boy reversed his t-shirt to remain at the celebration. No one was arrested for wearing the shirts. If instead they had remained and been arrested for wearing the provocative t-shirts, the US Supreme Court might be compelled to hear the appeal, based on the Cohen case. Even then, since school officials appear to have special authority on campus, they still could have been justified.
If you were deciding, should the appeal of the boys be heard by the US Supreme Court? Under what circumstances should political speech be silenced in the US? Should school officials have greater powers over free speech on campus than law enforcement has in the community?
Footnote: The original term used on the t-shirt of Leonard Cohen was the acronym commonly formed from the word posted on early American stockades for persons convicted of adultery, as they then defined adultery. Those words were: For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. You can probably figure out the acronym on your own. I deleted the acronymic expression at the request of Vivaldi censors who declined to publish this post unless the historically accurate term was either deleted or obfuscated. Hence, I have offered this obfuscatory footnote.
It’s hard to make a judgment call in situations like this. Perhaps the reasons given (gang violence could escalate) are genuine and the school officials were simply acting in the best interests (safety) of the students involved as well as the rest of the campus. Being from Canada where we do not have the same individual rights as the US citizenry have, I’m not as gung-ho on protecting the rights of individuals versus the entire group. I would opt to protect the safety of the campus over the possibility that individual rights might be trampled upon.