Posted on 11/05/2013 2:26:04 PM PST by darrellmaurina
Close to the center of Missouri, half way between Springfield and St. Louis, it is about 50 miles from Lake Ozark.
Probably due to it being a college town. My brother used to live in Starkville Mississippi, and that was the usual college town: urbane, nuanced, atheistic, and liberal, and just outside was Bubbaville.
This is to the left even of the ACLU’s position on free speech rights of students.
If we can't win this fight in a conservative rural part of the United States, we can't win anywhere. And by the way, thanking the FOX News reporter for being fair and balanced, since she put her email address at the bottom of her story, might be a really good idea.
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http://fox2now.com/2013/11/01/student-suspended-for-criticizing-gay-lifestyle-on-t-shirt/
ROLLA, MO (KTVI)– Rolla High School administrators suspended a sophomore student this week who refused to remove a tee shirt that displayed Bible verses opposing homosexuality.
Fellow student Courtney Hairfield and her older sister Heather Cheatham believe religious free speech is being denied by the district while student members of a Gay/Straight Alliance club at the high school are allowed to wear gay pride tee shirts.
‘The student came to school and he had three Bible verses on the front of his shirt and on the back it said `being gay ain`t right`,’ Hairfield said Friday.
Cheatham, who plans to take her complaint to the Rolla Board of Education, said “If it was something vulgar or had to do with drugs then yeah, I could understand why this happened. But it wasn`t profanity; it wasn`t anything. It`s aggravating.”
Rolla School District Superintendent Aaron Zalis declined to discuss the specific case but said “Students are given an opportunity to resolve an issue and to discuss it with a counselor. This is not that big of an issue.”
The dress code posted on the Rolla High School website indicates students will be told in private that their clothing could be a ‘disruptive influence or embarrassing to individual students or teachers.’ They then could be required to change clothing or wear a school spirit shirt and face disciplinary action including suspension.
Zalis said the dress code is regularly reviewed by a Board Policy Committee made up of students, parents and administrators.
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If the tee shirt had Bush Lied on it, that would have not been disruptive. Any statement can be disruptive, such as the simple “He is risen!”, depending upon the circumstances. But any rule that presumes to censor before the fact is dangerous and especially when it is imposed by liberals who are hell-bent (so to speak) to suppress any conservative who is scoring points against liberalism or the fruits of liberalism.
We enter Never-Never Land when the truth is no defense. Right and wrong are the key to learning and to a moral life. Jesus dictated the Book of Revelation to the Apostle John. In Revelation 22:15, Jesus tells us that no person who practices sexual immorality can attain salvation.
Not only is it true that homosexuality isn’t “right”, so is living with your unmarried girlfriend.
I live outside Fort Leonard Wood.
This uproar in Rolla is happening one county away from us.
I know about the problems of PC issues in the Army. I'm not disputing them. But I think it is fair to say that the sort of soldiers who like Fort Leonard Wood and especially those who choose to retire here are **WAY** more conservative than Rolla, and the Army is making our community more conservative, not less conservative, than it would be without the military.
A perfect example is one of our local lesbian couples. Retired military. Apart from homosexuality they'd make pretty good conservatives and most people don't know they are lesbians. Raised as small town Southern girls, were tomboys who liked guns and not dolls, joined the military, did the "don't ask don't tell" routine, retired, and didn't want to live in a big city.
The irony is that if the Rolla school were trying to censor these students for wearing a NRA T-shirt, or being opposed to Islamic fundamentalism, they'd be howling their heads off for the conservative side of the issue. As it stands, I know from prior experience they believe in free speech rights but stay away from free speech fights on the homosexual issue, regarding it as our battle to fight and pointing out (correctly) that they spent 20 years in the Army fighting for people's right to express their opinions, even when wrong.
As I tell my friends, when even some of your local homosexuals are gun-toting right-wing conservatives, you know you're not in a liberal part of the world.
“students are disciplined for wearing clothes that are disruptive, not because they have religious quotes written on them”
Nonsense. Since this is a controversial issue, pro-gay clothing is just as disruptive. When is the last time he disciplined a student for wearing “pride” t-shirt or rainbow flag adorned piece of clothing?
“not too long ago the Holy Spirit showed me how homosexuality represents a twisting of the very best virtues of the gospel”
Yeah, when Jesus said “love your fellow man”, he didn’t mean it like THAT!
Well, it gets into more detail and some may be squeamish about talking about it. Certainly buggery is not a beatitude.
Whether or not it was legitimate, the superintendent used the magic words, “students are disciplined for wearing clothes that are disruptive”. Legally they are in the clear, because schools are authorized to control student dress and accessories if they are “disruptive” to the educational process.
It’s usually pretty easy to tell if they are stepping over the line with this, for example banning NRA or political shirts.
An excellent example of this in the opposite direction was a school that prohibited a student from wearing a black outfit, just a black outfit, ordinary cut, because it was “Satanic”, with no other justification. But at the same time, they permitted very in-your-face displays that were Evangelical or Pentecostal.
When she asked them, they assured her that Christian religious displays were accepted, no matter what. Having a sense of humor, she decided to take them at their word.
She had a very talented artistic friend who, years before Mel Gibson’s tortured and bloody Jesus, produced a crucified image that would have been a big hit in medieval Spain. It was quite horrific. Then beneath it added rather harsh and not particularly Biblical statements, supposedly by the angry Jesus on the cross to the effect of “Worship me or burn in a fiery Hell of unending agony!”
The school administration didn’t bat an eye. Oddly enough, several of the other students expressed interest in getting one.
yefragetuwrabrumuy is right. I knew somebody else would eventually point it out.
Responding to a number of comments below, words mean things in law. “Disruption” is a legal term, and when applied to the educational environment, it allows educational officials at the high school level and below to remove things which would be acceptable outside the school environment but which interfere with the primary purpose of education for which the schools were created.
Now in theory, that's fine. We don't want female students wearing bikinis in the classroom, or men wearing shorts so tight they look like codpieces. Wearing gang insignia is disruptive. The same can be said of some other types of attire.
But when it comes to expression of political, religious, or cultural opinion, the court system has ruled that schools need to be very careful in defining the “disruption.”
To cite an example where the ACLU took the right side of an issue, they defended a student's right to wear a Confederate flag T-shirt expressing pride in Southern heritage.
As much as I detest Satanism, the example cited by yefragetuwrabrumuy of a grotesquely suffering Christ on the cross being used to mock Christians is **PRECISELY** the kind of speech that can and probably should be allowed in the public schools. If we're going to allow students to wear Christian T-shirts, we need to allow anti-Christian T-shirts.
The First Amendment exists for a reason.
What we **CANNOT** do is allow something called a “heckler's veto,” i.e., defining something as “disruptive” because people don't like it.
And that is what the Rolla principal has done.
This is a case we can win as conservatives. Let's take the ACLU’s decades of advocacy for free speech for every perverted deviant nonsensical minority viewpoint, and use it to force the Rolla Public Schools to acknowledge the right of the majority to oppose homosexuality.
Just because something offends me doesn't give me the right to forbid it.
Honest liberals understand that.
Liberals in Rolla need to learn that — at the point of a lawsuit if necessary.
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Sola Veritas asked this at post 8: “What I don’t understand is why doesn’t the dress code just say no writing, quotations, or slogans on shirts are allowed. Why use the criteria of ‘disruptive?’ I would consider an Obama ‘Hope and Change’ shirt to be disruptive...does the school? They need a code that is fully objective and in no way subjective and open to interpretation or opinion. Then maybe this would be a non-issue.”
TheBuckwheat wrote at 23: “If the tee shirt had Bush Lied on it, that would have not been disruptive. Any statement can be disruptive, such as the simple ‘He is risen!’, depending upon the circumstances. But any rule that presumes to censor before the fact is dangerous and especially when it is imposed by liberals who are hell-bent (so to speak) to suppress any conservative who is scoring points against liberalism or the fruits of liberalism.”
Boogieman wrote at 26: “Nonsense. Since this is a controversial issue, pro-gay clothing is just as disruptive. When is the last time he disciplined a student for wearing ‘pride’ t-shirt or rainbow flag adorned piece of clothing?”
P-Marlowe wrote at 9: “I would be willing to bet that Gay Pride T Shirts are perfectly acceptable, but any shirt with a contrary message is deemed ‘disruptive’. I am offended and disrupted by messages that homosexuality is something to be proud of. But then the rule is that there are some people you can’t offend and others that you are encouraged to offend.”
Blood of Tyrants wrote at 10: “The rule against ‘disruptive’ clothing is purposefully vague so that the sodomites can use it as a club to punish anyone who dares to point out their unnatural and unhealthy practices.”
The heckler’s veto has been the left’s biggest tool to ban conservatives speech by declaring that they are “offended”. I may be wrong, but I can’t find anything in the Constitution about a right to not be offended.
This is a key point of philosophical difference between liberals who are committed to free speech and are legitimately in the heritage of men like Jefferson and Franklin, and liberals who are intolerant leftists.
As much as I hate Nazis, what the ACLU did to defend the Nazi right to march in Skokie was correct. The only legitimate Constitutional argument to forbid the Nazi march would be to charge the American Nazi Party members with treason, and that's a case which is extremely difficult to make, constitutionally speaking, apart from wartime or Cold War conditions.
Liberalism has taken a dangerous turn in the last couple of decades. Instead of defending free speech rights of minority viewpoints (which is legitimate) and tolerance for minority viewpoints (which may or may not be legitimate, depending on details), liberals who have taken control of the levers of power are now becoming intolerant themselves and forcing their own intolerant views on conservatives.
“Hate speech” and similar terms are fundamentally contrary to liberal principles.
Again, this fight in Rolla is one we can win. The liberals are themselves divided because of prior court precedents on free speech rights. This isn't San Francisco or someplace where opponents of homosexuality are a minority; the majority in this area opposes homosexuality.
If we lose this fight, it's our own fault.
But considering the conservative history of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, we may well lose. Again. And for no good reason.
A lib weapon that can potentially be brought to bear against them in a lawsuit is their concept of “disparate impact”. It doesn’t matter if the school can demonstrate the shirt was actually disruptive or not, if the plaintiff can show that the application of the policy has a disparate impact on one group. Then it becomes de facto evidence of discrimination against that group by the administration, even without any demonstration of intent.
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