PASADENA, Calif. — Attorneys with the Alliance Defense Fund say they plan to appeal today’s ruling by two judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit who upheld a high school’s decision to prohibit a student from expressing his views regarding homosexual behavior on a T-shirt.
“Students do not give up their First Amendment rights at the schoolhouse door,” said ADF Senior Legal Counsel Kevin Theriot. “This panel has upheld school censorship of student expression if it is the Christian view of homosexual behavior. They have essentially determined that student quotation of Scripture can be prohibited. This case will proceed at the district court level, but we intend to appeal today’s extremely poor ruling to the full 9th Circuit.”
ADF attorneys represent Poway High School student Chase Harper, who was forbidden by school officials from wearing a T-shirt expressing his religious point of view on homosexual behavior. A school administrator told Harper to “leave his faith in the car” when his faith might offend others (
www.telladf.org/news/story.aspx?cid=2746).
The decision today by the two-judge majority of a three-judge 9th Circuit panel upholds a lower court’s denial of a motion by ADF attorneys that asked for Poway High School’s policy regarding the T-shirt to be immediately halted while the case moves forward.
The third judge, Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski, vigorously dissented: “I have considerable difficulty with giving school authorities the power to decide that only one side of a controversial topic may be discussed in the school environment because the opposing point of view is too extreme or demeaning.... The fundamental problem with the majority’s approach is that it has no anchor anywhere in the record or in the law. It is entirely a judicial creation, hatched to deal with the situation before us, but likely to cause innumerable problems in the future.”
The two-judge majority criticized Kozinski, suggesting that the majority could rely upon the motion pictures
Brokeback Mountain or
The Matthew Shepard Story “as evidence of the harmful effects of anti-gay harassment....”
“The majority implied that
Brokeback Mountain is in, and the Bible is out. What’s really broken here is the majority’s approach to the First Amendment,” Theriot observed.
“The court has manufactured new law in the area of student speech in saying students cannot say anything that school officials deem ‘demeaning’ to another,” Theriot explained. “This is the same court that ruled that parental rights stop at the schoolhouse gate and that ‘God’ should be removed from the Pledge of Allegiance. This case is not over.”
The opinion issued by the 9th Circuit in the case
Harper v. Poway Unified School District can be read at
www.telladf.org/UserDocs/HarperOpinion.pdf.
ADF is a legal alliance defending the right to hear and speak the Truth through strategy, training, funding, and litigation.
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