Attorney General Alan Wilson co-leads brief to protect students’ free speech rights

(COLUMBIA, S.C.) – South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson filed a friend-of-the-court brief today with the U.S. Supreme Court, along with 17 other states, to protect students’ First Amendment free speech rights.

A middle school student in Massachusetts wore a t-shirt to school that had the message, “There are only two genders.” School officials told the student he couldn’t wear the shirt. The student then put tape over the word “two,” so the message read, “There are only (censored) genders,” but school officials banned that too.

“Free speech is protected even for t-shirts and even in school,” Attorney General Wilson said. “The school actively promoted gender identity theory in the classroom, and yet banned this t-shirt, so this is viewpoint discrimination in public schools. The Supreme Court ruled in a 1969 case that teachers and students don’t ‘shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate,’ and that’s what’s happening here.”

The brief from the attorneys general asks the Supreme Court to hear the case after a lower court sided with the school.

In referring to the 1969 case, known as Tinker, the brief argues that the Supreme Court ruled in that case that, “a student may express his mind ‘if he does so without materially and substantially interfering with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school and without colliding with the rights of others.’”

South Carolina and West Virginia co-led the brief, joined by the attorneys general from Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Texas, Utah, and Virginia.

You can read the brief here.