Only positive messages will be tolerated.

The College Fix reports.

Pro-LGBT statements OK on high school T-shirts, but not anti-LGBT statements

A principal at a Tennessee high school told a student in front of her peers that her shirt reading “Some People Are Gay, Get Over It” was not allowed.

Nor was “any other shirt referencing LGBT rights,” because such messages are “sexual,” according to a federal judge’s ruling last week that approved an injunction against the school’s enforcement of the ban.

Richland High School’s stated rationale for the ban was to protect Rebecca Young and other students wearing such shirts from “bullying or harassment” by their peers, though only her principal, Micah Landers, and Giles County director of schools, Phillip Wright, made a commotion over it.

Judge Kevin Sharp was surprised this case landed on his desk: “The legal ground covering such issues is so well-trod that the Court finds itself surprised at the need to journey down this path.” (Indeed, the school didn’t bother responding to the lawsuit.)

The Tinker standard from the Supreme Court doesn’t allow schools to invent a “disruption” out of thin air to justify a suppression, particularly when there’s no evidence that the school is also barring anti-LGBT messages on shirts, Sharp ruled.

Yet schools have done exactly that for t-shirt speech that is currently out of favor – Confederate flags and anti-LGBT messages – and courts have upheld those bans, as Frank LoMonte of the Student Press Law Center notes in a contextual analysis of Young v. Giles.

LoMonte cites several other court decisions in favor of pro-gay apparel and only one that upheld a student’s right to wear a shirt that’s mildly disapproving of homosexuality at most (“Be Happy, Not Gay”):

In a contrary view that appears based on the especially harsh language of the shirt, a federal appeals court sided with a California high school that banned a T-shirt reading, “I WILL NOT ACCEPT WHAT GOD HAS CONDEMNED… HOMOSEXUALITY IS SHAMEFUL,” which the judges classified as a “verbal assault” intruding on the rights of LGBT students to feel safe.