A Truthful T-Shirt Gets A Middle School Boy In Hot Water

I was shopping with my granddaughter at T.J. Maxx last week when I spied a rack of T-shirts.

I held up a cute little one with a sweet slogan, something like “Angels don’t always have wings, sometimes they have whiskers,” with a kitten on it, but she solemnly shook her head.

“We can’t wear shirts with writing on them to school,” she said flatly. “Dress code.”

Oh, I didn’t know. But that rule makes sense.

Especially after yesterday’s boneheaded decision by the U.S. Supreme Court not to hear an important T-shirt case.

Before the highest court in the land was the case of a 7th grade boy named Liam Morrison from Middleborough, Massachusetts. In 2023 he was sent home from school because the slogan on his T-shirt was deemed “offensive” to some students.

The offending words: 

“There Are Only Two Genders.”

Wait. What? There ARE only two genders. What was the administration thinking?

Apparently this school is woke. Shoot, it celebrated another student on official school social media wearing a T-shirt that said “HE SHE THEY IT’S ALL OKAY.”

Sigh. That tee was fine, Liam’s wasn’t.

Actually, it’s the he/she/they shirt that is not OK. 

If a girl has an eating disorder, that generally isn’t celebrated by school administrators and parents. Usually the adults seek help for the mentally ill child.

The same should go for confused kids who believe they’re a member of the opposite sex. We shouldn’t be encouraging their fantasies. Instead, we should be trying to get help to convince them they’re fine just the way they are.

Back to the T-shirt. How did a simple factual statement on a shirt get a boy in trouble? Seems the trans kids in his school got their feelings hurt.

According to The New York Times: 

His parents sued, saying the school’s policy violated the First Amendment. They relied on a landmark 1969 Supreme Court decision, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, which held that public school students have First Amendment rights. In that case, students sought to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam War.

Justice Abe Fortas, writing for the majority, said students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” But he added that disruptive speech could be punished.

Was Morrison’s T-shirt disruptive? Hardly.

Yet a federal district court agreed that the school had a right to order Liam Morrison to remove his T-shirt. A federal appeals court agreed.

And yesterday the Supremes took a pass and refused to hear the case, leaving in place the appeals court ruling.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented.

Fox New reports: 

According to Alito, Morrison was attempting to “register his dissent and start a dialogue on the topic” of gender identity, a subject on which Alito claims the school itself promotes a specific viewpoint. “NMS promotes the view that gender is a fluid construct and that a person’s self-defined identity — not biological sex — determines whether that person is male, female, or something else,” Alito stated. He highlighted an instance where the school reportedly shared an image on social media of a student wearing a T-shirt that read: “HE SHE THEY IT’S ALL OKAY.”

“If a school sees fit to instruct students of a certain age on a social issue like LGBTQ+ rights or gender identity, then the school must tolerate dissenting student speech on those issues,”wrote Alito. “… If anything, viewpoint discrimination in the lower grades is more objectionable because young children are more impressionable and thus more susceptible to indoctrination.”

This is a cowardly two-step by the Supremes. A child should be free to wear a “There are only two genders”  T-shirt at a school that is pushing gender ideology, and certainly at a school that allows a kid to parade around in a “He She They, It’s All OK.”

Go ahead and ban all writing on T-shirts, that just makes shopping at T.J. Maxx a little tricky. But school administrators should not be allowed to censor viewpoints they don’t condone. The Supreme Court should have smacked the knuckles of these knuckleheads. Alas, they took the easy way out.