BOSTON, Mass. – Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach this week filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the U.S. Supreme Court, along with 17 other states, to protect students’ First Amendment free speech rights.
Thirteen year-old Boston, Mass., middle schooler Liam Morrison wore a t-shirt to school that had the message, “There are only two genders.” School officials told the student he couldn’t wear the shirt. The student then put tape over the word “two,” so the message read, “There are only (censored) genders,” but school officials banned that too.
“The right to free speech does not disappear inside a school building. The First Amendment protects this student’s right to speak — even when that speech is disfavored by woke school administrators,” Kobach said.
The brief from the attorneys general asks the Supreme Court to hear the case after a lower court sided with the school. School officials said they were looking out for LGBTQ students welfare.
Deborah Ecker, a lawyer for the Middleborough School Committee, told NBC News the school officials’ actions were motivated by concern for the mental health of LGBTQ students, “who are captive in this classroom looking at it.”
“I think that this message, that there are only two genders, is vile and it says to someone who is nonbinary that you do not exist, that your validity does not exist, and it attacks the very core characteristic,” Ecker told NBC.
In referring to the 1969 case, known as Tinker, the Kobach’s brief argues that the Supreme Court ruled in that case that, “a student may express his mind ‘if he does so without materially and substantially interfering with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school and without colliding with the rights of others.’”
South Carolina and West Virginia co-led the brief, joined by the attorneys general from Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Texas, Utah, and Virginia.
You can read the brief here.
Dane Hicks is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and the United States Marine Corps Officer Candidate School at Quantico, VA. He is the author of novels "The Skinning Tree" and "A Whisper For Help." As publisher of the Anderson County Review in Garnett, KS., he is a recipient of the Kansas Press Association's Boyd Community Service Award as well as more than 60 awards for excellence in news, editorial and photography.
