The reason was that it intimidated some students.
I don’t see how, unless they themselves had a preconceived and biased opinion of those who might wear those styles.
Don’t we have openly gay members of the military now? Don’t they wear camo on duty? I bet there are even a few gay hunters out there.

But they most certainly allowed people the wear the rainbow colors in support of LGBT. For pretty much the whole of the school year.

But some people are allowed to have and display a prejudice as long as its the correct type I guess.

I agree, some sort of limits should be in place. Censorship does indeed make sense when students test the boundaries of taste and civil discourse — as they are apt to do. In the past, it seems that adult thinking and common sense prevailed and issues were generally handled according to community standards. Now, it seems that it’s a situation of everything or nothing. Therefore schools don’t permit anything and even the slightest deviation is treated like a federal offense by small minded people. This is just the type of environment that allows the PC police to run amok. Something I’m sure that most followers of this blog detest.

There have to be SOME sort of limits, somewhere. Look. Jared’s tee shirt wasn’t there — it was a nondescript gray and brown shirt, not at all flamboyant, and sensible adults should have shrugged it off, and most kids would never have paid much attention, until it started off a big fuss. Other hand — suppose this had been the 1930’s, and some kid wore a tee shirt with a big red swastika and a slogan like “Jews — Get Out!” Maybe his parents would have felt really deeply that that was a wonderful principle for running society, and that America ought to follow the example set by our German cousins. Free expression of ideas, yadda yadda yadda, all that. Would it be — from a adult viewpoint in 2014 — acceptable for a 9th grade kid to wear such a shirt around, displaying it to 7th and 8th grade kids, and having the school’s adults just put up with it?

I’m picking an extreme example, I realize. I’m trying to make the argument that there is SOME point at which adult censorship of student political activity is justified, not that it’s always justified. FWIW, my dad was a high school principal, so I’ve sat through my share of hearing The Adults make big deals out of things that were pretty silly, and sometimes tried to inject a modicum of sense (usually without much success, I admit).

Suppose, for the sake of argument, another set of parents had responded the following week by encouraging their daughters to wear sweaters to school with slogans like “LGBT Rights!” or “ABORTION ON DEMAND”? Would that seem quite as amusing?

Why not? The best outcome would be that we would all just learn to get along even if we find the ideas expressed by the other person to be abhorrent to our own preferences and predilections. Isn’t tolerance in its pure form what we want?

Or suppose we really had a perfect world and didn’t use kids to fight their parents’ political battles.

By age 14 some kids, but not all, are already forming their own ideas on what is right and wrong and which ideas are worth making a stand on. In such instances, I would say that it is more harmful to society to suppress such feelings and force kids into the conformity of non-expression of anything that might be provocative or controversial.

Having seen a picture, it didn’t strike me as all that obnoxious a shirt. And looking back, I can recall the Good Old Days, when college kids wore berets and tee shirts with Che Guerara’s face under a REVOLUTION NOW! legend. We all survived the savage experience, as I recall, even the professors. So some things can be laughed off. That said, wearing a tee shirt with a political slogan is … provocative, let’s say. It’s not a totally innocent act. You know darn well that wearing it to junior high school or high school would cause someone to react somehow, whether by quietly wincing or loudly climbing the walls. I think you can guess that Jared anticipated such a reaction when he put the shirt on, and that his parents might have anticipated that as well.

I.e., this isn’t a case of sweet innocent youth being persecuted out of the blue by maniacs. It’s a nice American story of a set of people deliberately pushing buttons to get a response and then pretending to be surprised by the outcome. Suppose, for the sake of argument, another set of parents had responded the following week by encouraging their daughters to wear sweaters to school with slogans like “LGBT Rights!” or “ABORTION ON DEMAND”? Would that seem quite as amusing?

Or suppose we really had a perfect world and didn’t use kids to fight their parents’ political battles.