The school administration because it adheres strictly to political correctness must find a way out of several dilemmas.
First it had the evident inconsistency in defending teacher tenure because tenure is necessary for teachers to operate with freedom of conscience against the requirement of political correctness to censor a teacher's decision to display a disfavored historic symbol.
Second, the administration has to defend the policy which inculcates a view of history to the exclusion of other potential views of history while evading the charge that they are censoring history, thus corrupting the very essence of education.
Third, the administration must defend the principle that it is the administration which decides these issues, not the parents, not the teachers, not the courts, not the state legislature.
How does it solve all of these thorny problems in a stroke? It changes the subject from censorship to child protection. We are not talking here about a political/historical point of view, we are talking about potential risk to the physical safety of children-or so the administration would have you believe.
Unfortunately, the administration would have you believe that on no evidence or at best the flimsiest of evidence and evidence even when only flimsy evidence is more problem producing than the alleged threat itself.
What evidence does the administration adduce in support of the conclusion that displaying the Confederate battle flag, "creates an unsafe environment for students?" No evidence at all really except that the administration does preference that assertion with the finding that “We recognize that regardless of context, to many of our students, families, and staff, the Confederate flag is a racist symbol of hate”.
So the administration is not saying that the flag itself has intrinsic power to endanger children, rather the subjective reaction of "many" of "our students families and staff" might be such as to endanger children. This justification has no doubt been made in consultation with the school administration's lawyers who are aware that the courts have held that censorship of speech (T-shirts, for example) in schools is to be broadly permitted on a child safety basis.
Here we see the enshrinement of subjectivism over the First Amendment. Here government censors speech based on the presumed reaction of unnamed individuals. This is a tendency which the left has been emphasizing for some time now, the undermining of the First Amendment by resort to subjective feelings of others, especially favored classes such as African Americans.
Our posters have instinctively seen this and they say that other symbols, dear to the left if despised by the right, would probably be permitted to adorn the classroom walls of this institution. Political correctness triumphs over the Constitution, over the independent judgment of a teacher, perhaps over the desires of a majority of the parents and, without reference to law or courts, the state agency engages in prior censorship, before the school children have a chance to see the flag.
All we have to do to get around the Bill of Rights is change the label.
