Anti-Gay Shirt May be Headed for SCOTUS

A legal battle being waged on behalf of a suburban San Diego teenager who was barred from wearing a T-shirt with anti-gay rhetoric to class could end up in the US Supreme Court legal analysts suggest.

A federal judge in San Diego is weighing arguments over whether the Poway Unified School District violated Tyler Chase Harper's First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and religion for keeping him out of class when he wore a shirt on the National Day of Silence in 2004.

The T-shirt was hand-lettered with the words "I Will Not Accept What God Has Condemned" on the front and on the back it read "Homosexuality is Shameful" and "Romans 1:27," a reference to a Bible passage.
Any kid who wears a shirt like that probably has a truly fucked-up home life. He reminds me of kids I knew in high school who would go off on religious tangents about “queers and faggots and Sodomites” and ended up sucking dick in the parking lot of the Scuttlebutt Lounge to finance their meth habits. Anyway…

What do you think? Should that shirt be considered protected speech and religious expression in a public school?

Seems to me this falls under the same principle as t-shirts bearing images of alcohol and tobacco are banned in most public high schools. The argument is that the adverts could entice students to smoke or drink when they’re not of legal age. A similar argument about inciting intolerance against LGBT students could be made about this shirt, I believe. Plus, I still hold to my firm belief that religious freedom is limited to the right to practice your own religious beliefs, full stop. If you believe homosexuality is a sin, then you have the right not to be homosexual. You don’t have the right to harass people who disagree with you.

Would this even be up for debate if the shirt said “Blacks are inferior” or “Women belong in the kitchen”? Those statements don’t seem qualitatively different from “Homosexuality is shameful.” The only difference is that the latter has a biblical citation after it.

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