School T-Shirt Wars, Part MCXLVI: Kids can't wear U.S. flag shirts on May 5

I addressed this already, but you know that because you've memorized my posts in this thread.

And as I said many pages ago (come on, Mr. Archiver! Did you miss it?), if they think they have a legal leg to stand on, then the kids and their mommies and daddies can take it to court.

 

Feel free to direct me to the post.

 

Funnily enough, the vice principal's actions have escalated this into an actual classroom disruption:

http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local/south_bay&id=7427683

 

So you don't believe in preventative measures. I take it you don't look both ways before you cross the street or anything like that.

The Constitution guarantees you life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, so if a car did plow over you, he would be violating your Constitutional rights, wouldn't he?

 

Yes. Bizarre as it sounds, Cinco de Mayo is celebrated more in the U.S. In Mexico, it's sort of of on par with President's day or Columbus day here, one of those lesser holidays nobody does anything special for. And that's how it remained until beer companies created ad campaigns around celebrating it, and Americans bought it hook, line and sinker.

 

I believe in *reasonable* preventative measures. The mere fact that you can theorize a situation in which something bad might happen isn't enough to justify the limitation of speech.

Again, I refer to the Supreme Court in Tinker v. Des Moines:

"in our system, undifferentiated fear or apprehension of disturbance is not enough to overcome the right to freedom of expression. "

That's all the "fights might break out" argument is. It's trying to justify prohibition of speech by appealing to hypotheticals that, on their face, might fit the "disturbance" exception, when really what is at work here is a desire to ban speech that the might merely offend someone else.

 

That phrase does not appear anywhere in the Constitution, incidentally.

 

The disruption is happening because the attempt to squash the speech has turned this into a much larger incident. You don't get to hold people's speech hostage by saying "I'm going to throw a fit if you do something I don't like."

Yes, I would.

 

So, in your opinion, 60 kids would be marching out of class today if the shirts had just been worn all day with no intervention from school officials?

And, even if it's agreed that wearing the shirts causes the disruption, then the appropriate response is to ban *all* shirts that could be considered to have any sort of political message. You can't single out specific messages.

 

But . . but . . .

Do they have the MORAL right to do that?

 

Yes.

 

If a bunch of kids wore "Allah Akbar" tees on Yom Kippur, Rick would be ok with that, too.
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Difference is, there has been plenty of violence associated with "Allah Akbar", in the world today.

The U.S. and Mexico last fought an official war in 1848.