Sleeth Jr., a lawyer representing the Poway district, said the school system is also being sued in state court by gay students who maintain that officials have failed to protect them from harassment. But the judge also held that the boy’s contention that the district had violated his First Amendment rights deserved to go forward. Harper’s motion that the district be ordered to let him to wear his shirt. “If they’re going to open it up to allow the homosexual agenda to be pushed in schools, then they have to allow the mainstream view to be expressed as well.” Tyler, a lawyer with the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Alliance Defense Fund, who is representing Mr. “We have a school district that aggressively supported the pushing of the homosexual agenda within the public schools,” said Robert H. One of his shirts featured the message, “Be ashamed: Our school embraced what God has condemned.” Harper, 16, wore his shirt to protest his schoolmates’ participation last April in the annual Day of Silence, a national event coordinated by the New York City-based Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network in which students mark their support for gay rights by not talking for a day. Harper sued the 33,000-student Poway district last June after administrators there barred him from wearing a shirt with such hand-lettered messages as “Homosexuality is shameful.” “If you have no governance of messages that a student might be wearing, then what happens when somebody comes in with a shirt saying ‘I hate gays,’ ” he said. Lankford said in an interview that high school students should not have to serve as a captive audience for societal arguments over homosexuality. Mathewson only after other students complained about harassment from students wearing gay-pride shirts.
Contending that he was discriminated against because of his sexual orientation, he alleged that students came to school with bumper stickers denouncing gay marriage, and that his shirts “weren’t even really noticed until the school drew attention to them.”Ī lawyer for the 3,750-student Webb City district said school leaders took action against Mr. 23 news conference announcing the federal suit. “Webb City High School is trying to deny my rights by silencing me,” Mr. Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas and Western Missouri, he sued the Webb City school district after administrators ordered him to stop wearing T-shirts supporting gay rights, including one proclaiming, “I’m gay and I’m proud.” Mathewson attended high school until dropping out last month.
One of several recent skirmishes in the T-shirt wars erupted in November in a rural area of southwestern Missouri, where Mr. Little wonder, then, that once schools get caught up in the fray over T-shirts about gays, many are finding it hard to emerge unscathed.