Blacklisted 12-year-old appeals lower court decision saying he has no free speech rights
Liam Morrison, wearing the evil shirt that he wore the
second time teachers at Nichols Middle School sent
him home.
Bring a gun to a knife fight: Today’s blacklist story is a follow-up from May. At that time 12-year-old Liam Morrison had discovered that his school, Nichols Middle School in Middleborough, Massachusetts, would not allow him to wear a shirt that said “There are only two genders,” and when he tried to return to school with a shirt that instead said “There are only censored genders,” he was sent home again.
Morrison and his parents enlisted the non-profit legal firm Alliance Defending Freedom to sue for his first amendment rights, but in June Judge Indira Talwani (appointed by Barack Obama) ruled that Morrison had no right to the first amendment, that his shirt infringed other “students’ rights to be ‘secure and to be let alone’ during the school day.”
You can read her convoluted ruling here [pdf], which required her to ignore numerous previous Supreme Court rulings that have specifically protected student speech exactly like Morrison’s. Moreover, her decision is also based on the fraudulent premise that people are supposed to be protected from speech that offends them. If people have the power to silence any speech because it hurts their feelings then no free speech exists at all. We will live in a totalitarian nightmare worse than anything dreamed up by George Orwell.
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