Opinion: A cheerleader's salty language gives the Supreme Court a chance to bolster First Amendment

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Opinion: A cheerleader’s salty language gives the Supreme Court a chance to bolster the First Amendment

Opinion by George F. Will
Columnist
April 26, 2021 at 5:29 p.m. EDT

The case of the cheerleader’s salty language comes to the Supreme Court on Wednesday, at a moment when technological and social changes should cause the court to expand First Amendment protections of student speech. Social media necessitate rethinking the proper scope of government’s jurisdiction, through public schools, in controlling students. And the fact that freedom of speech is besieged in academic settings justifies judicial supervision of schools’ attempts to extend their controls.

When B.L., a Pennsylvania ninth-grader, failed to make the varsity cheerleading team, she posted on Snapchat a picture of her raised middle finger and this caption: “Fuck school fuck softball fuck cheer fuck everything.” Another student brought this episode of adolescent volatility to the attention of the school’s coaches, who suspended B.L. from the junior varsity cheerleading team because she had damaged the school’s image by violating the requirement to “have respect” for coaches and the rule against “foul language and inappropriate gestures.”

B.L.’s parents sued the school district for violating her First Amendment rights. Two lower courts sided with her, citing cases beginning with the Supreme Court’s 1969 ruling about two Des Moines high school students who planned to wear black armbands to school to protest the Vietnam War. The Iowa school preemptively adopted a rule making refusal to remove an armband grounds for suspension. The students’ parents sued. Two lower courts upheld the rule as reasonably related to maintaining school order. The Supreme Court ruled otherwise, saying that armbands are quiet and passive, and hence neither disruptive nor violative of the rights of others. ... The court said students do not lose their constitutional rights when they enter school property. In 1969, however, the world was young and social media were nonexistent. Today, tens of millions of students are doing “remote learning,” and off-campus social media speech saturates schools. B.L.’s school says she has scant First Amendment protections even away from school because social media guarantee that what is said off-campus does not stay off campus.

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In the 1969 armband case, when the court said schools may not become “enclaves of totalitarianism,” this language conjured a merely hypothetical danger. No longer. Today, many schools, from kindergarten through college, are aggressive engines of intellectual homogeneity, sacrificing freedom of speech to imperatives of woke indoctrination. This cultural change, and the dynamics of social media, require from the court a defense of the First Amendment as robust as today’s assaults on it.

Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook.

[eppur_se_muova]

2. Sorry, George, you've got it wrong. FA says you can't be PREVENTED from saying things ...

in no way does it protect you from the CONSEQUENCES of saying them. Go back and study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_v._Minnesota again.

When you post to social media, it is the same as if you had published in the paper. It is in the public space, not privileged communication. The "off-campus" distinction is bogus here.