The 1969 Tinker v. Des Moines court decision involved three Iowa high school students who wore black armbands in 1965 to protest the Vietnam War. School officials had managed to stop the young people’s political speech.
In a landmark ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court wrote that students “do not surrender their constitutional rights to free speech and expression at the schoolhouse gate.”
New York University’s First Amendment Watch noted on the 50th anniversary of the decision that “school officials could not censor student speech unless doing so would ‘materially and substantially disrupt’ the operation of the school.”
The Tinker v. Des Moines ruling was a milestone in affirming students’ freedom to express themselves free from government censorship. To this day, free speech advocates cite it in their noble plea.
But the lesson of Tinker v. Des Moines — that the Constitution protects young people’s disagreement with government policy — has fallen out of fashion on the left. This is an era when left-wing fascists, who are openly hostile to the expression of citizens who challenge their ideals, exploit authority to undermine independent expression – including that of students.
A June 10 Reuters story (“Massachusetts school may ban dual-gender student’s shirt, court rules”) reported that the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled that teachers at Nichols Middle School in Middleborough should had not violated a seventh-grader’s First Amendment rights by 2023 by forcing him to either take off a T-shirt with the message “There are only two genders” or go home for the day.
Twelve-year-old Liam Morrison chose to go home. He had chosen the message on the shirt to protest against officials’ plastering of school walls with pro-LGBT propaganda and the celebration of Pride Month.
But the court’s Democratic-appointed majority was indifferent to First Amendment interests. It found that educators had acted appropriately in censoring a message that officials claimed could demean classmates’ chosen identities and violate the “hate speech” provision of the school’s dress code.
Injured student Morrison is represented by Christian attorneys from the Alliance Defending Freedom. After the unjust verdict, they vowed to continue to advocate for Morrison’s speech rights in future actions. They fight the Good Fight.
But they face an ideological enemy that places the left-wing authoritarian government far above individual freedoms. Consider the Supreme Court’s oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri — what mattered was that the Biden administration was covertly pressuring Big Tech overlords to “disappear” stories that weren’t to its taste, like the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s ‘Laptop from Hell’ – judge Ketanji Brown Jackson (who cannot define “woman”) lamented that a strong guarantee of speech could hamper government.
“My biggest concern is that your position allows the First Amendment to hamper the government in important ways,” she told lawyers who support open speech.
One of the purposes of the First Amendment, of course, is to prevent powerful authorities from suppressing citizens’ opinions by protecting our freedom to express controversial ideas.
The Tinker-era Supreme Court understood that.
DC Larson, a writer, lives in Waterloo. Contact: davidcharleslarson@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared in the Des Moines Register: Major government partisans crush conservative student speech
