Dissent from Thomas
Justice Clarence Thomas dissented, writing that students like the former cheerleader "who are active in extracurricular programs have a greater potential, by virtue of their participation, to harm those programs."
"For example, a profanity-laced screed delivered on social media or at the mall has a much different effect on a football program when done by a regular student than when done by the captain of the football team. So, too, here," Thomas wrote.
It's not like this girl made a threat against someone. She's a teenager - it's pretty much in their job description to say stupid things that they'll regret later in life so I respectfully disagree with Justice Thomas. Thankfully the rest of the justices did, too.
That being said there's a common trope coming from the loudest and most moral busybodies in academia that "Americans just want babysitters for their kids three quarters of the year". Sometimes I think it's projection.
I'm not American and free speech isn't an area I'm clued up on, but following on from that judge's words.. are there situations where more privileged/famous people have less freedom of speech (in a quasi-legal sense, rather than a 'social consequences' one) than others in the US?
No, famous people have the same freedom of speech as anyone else.
But the reasoning of this case indicates that a message sent by a high school student who has a million followers on twitter could be regulated by a school, even if that same message would not have been allowed to be regulated if sent by someone with 5 followers. This is because the large number of followers increases the likelihood of a "substantial disruption" (a term of art from prior cases).
An interesting question: what if someone with 5 followers sends a tweet, which is then picked up and RT'd by someone with a million followers? Should the school be able to regulate the original message (i.e., punish the student) simply because someone with a large following agreed with them? Presumably they couldn't punish the student before the RT, but what about after?
You have to see this with two lenses. Free speech is always about freedom from government control. Your employer can put whatever restriction on your speech that they so desire even outside of your workplace. In that sense famous people do have less freedom. For example basketball players promoting Nike can't wear any other shoes publicly.
Second case is of government putting those restrictions on you. Can public school put such restrictions on students ? I do not know and I am not familiar with this case.
> Free speech is always about freedom from government control.
You are confusing "free speech" and "the First Amendment". Free speech has nothing to do with government; it's a generally applicable concept. The First Amendment specifies a requirement for the government to respect freedom of speech. That wouldn't even make sense if freedom of speech weren't a general concept.
> That wouldn't even make sense if freedom of speech weren't a general concept.
Free speech as a general concept is irrelevant in the eyes of law unless you have some specific law governing the specific scenarios. (Employees being punished for how they voted in general election.)
Free speech could be a virtue but it is a virtue like "not lying". It is perfectly legal to lie in many circumstances.
Sorry, what does this comment have to do with anything?
I was responding to the claim "Free speech is always about freedom from government control", emphasis mine. Where did "in the eyes of law" come from? How is this contributing to the conversation?
It's okay to just admit that someone else's clarification was helpful and move on. You don't have to add irrelevant, non-clarifying addenda in order to seem like the more knowledgeable party.
In as much as their privilege and fame might make their words more likely to influence people, possibly.
> Advocacy of force or criminal activity does not receive First Amendment protections if (1) the advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action, and (2) is likely to incite or produce such action.
Ironic, since Thomas is the person who didn't mind having a negative effect on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Supreme Court with his behavior toward women and atheists.
You mean the sham of Anita Hill? You'd think people like you would be thoroughly embarrassed to continually push these tropes - then again embarrassment requires self awareness and humility.
If you actually read his dissent, instead of a hack summary, you would see he thinks they didn't go far enough in constraining the schools. Quite the opposite of what is implied by CNN. But hey, as long as someone holds a dissenting political opinion they aren't human and therefor fair game, right?
Speech reasonably interpreted as bearing the school’s imprimatur falls outside the scope of this opinion so these comments would need to be made personally and not "as the school team". The opinion still allows students consent to additional restrictions on their speech. Requiring such consent to attend regular school isn't allowed because students are required to attend school. But requiring such consent to participate in extracurricular activities like sports teams would still be allowed.
So in your example the school would simply need to require consent from students to have their speech restricted before they can participate in extracurricular programs like the football team.
His stance is less confusing if you actually read it in context, instead of carless (being very charitable) summation that completely misses his point. Ignorance or malice? Either is terrible. Here's the relevant part from the introduction of his dissent. Note he doesn't have issue with the outcome, but the extremely sloppy and haphazard way in which the decision was outlined.
I quote: "The Court overrides that decision—without even mentioning the 150 years of history supporting the coach. Using broad brushstrokes, the majority outlines the scope of school authority. When students are on campus, the majority says, schools have authority in loco parentis—that is, as substitutes of parents—to discipline speech and conduct. Off campus, the authority of schools is somewhat less. At that level of generality, I agree. But the majority omits important detail. What authority does a school have when it operates in loco parentis? How much less authority do schools have over off-campus speech and conduct? And how does a court decide if speech is on or off campus?
Disregarding these important issues, the majority simply posits three vague considerations and reaches an outcome.
A more searching review reveals that schools historically could discipline students in circumstances like those presented here. Because the majority does not attempt to explain why we should not apply this historical rule and does not attempt to tether its approach to anything stable, I respectfully dissent. "
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/20-255_g3bi.pdf
Page 34
If you actually read his dissent, instead of a hack summary, you would see he thinks they didn't go far enough in constraining the schools. Quite the opposite of what is implied by CNN.
Unsurprising. CNN decided long ago that Thomas is "the other" and they'll never be charitable when it comes to people on that side of the political aisle.
Before I get the deluge of "WHATABOUT fox news" comments. Yes, Fox news is horrible and they are never charitable either.
I'm just an amateur occasional Supreme Court-watcher, but just reading his dissent I wouldn't go so far as to say he thinks schools need to be more constrained than the majority does. He might or he might not. Or maybe I missed something you picked up on. What is clear to me is that he thinks there are crucial unresolved issues that the majority punted on.
The process of the court's opinion-writing sometimes involves several justices circulating draft opinions and trying to recruit others to sign on. Thomas might have written such a draft opinion with very careful reasoning, perhaps even concurring in the majority's judgment, but nobody else was willing to sign on to some of his specific reasoning that he thought was crucial, so he took his toys and went home.
Had he agreed with the outcome but not the opinion, he'd write a concurrence (like Alito did).
Multiple times in Thomas's dissent he says the couch was right to have punished from prior standards. His dissent can be boiled down to "The court is not considering prior precedence and should have sided with the couch".
> While the majority entirely ignores the relevant history,I would begin the assessment of the scope of free-speech rights incorporated against the States by looking to “what‘ordinary citizens’ at the time of [the Fourteenth Amend-ment’s] ratification would have understood” the right to en-compass. McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U. S. 742, 813 (2010) (THOMAS, J., concurring in part and concurring in judg-ment). Cases and treatises from that era reveal that public schools retained substantial authority to discipline stu-dents. As I have previously explained, that authority was near plenary while students were at school. See Morse v. Frederick, 551 U. S. 393, 419 (2007) (concurring opinion).Authority also extended to when students were traveling toor from school. See, e.g., Lander v. Seaver, 32 Vt. 114, 120 (1859). And, although schools had less authority after a student returned home, it was well settled that they still could discipline students for off-campus speech or conduct that had a proximate tendency to harm the school environ-ment.
While I strongly disagree with Thomas's decision, I disagree on the basis of several of the issues that he himself points out as unaddressed by the majority. Specifically, the widespread compulsory nature of schooling today vs in the 19th century, which Alito's concurring opinion outlines, as well as the limited-scope of snapchat "stories"; it is not the student's fault that speech intended to be transitory and limited in distribution was screenshotted and amplified. This case was much more like speech at a casual in-person meet-up outside of school than Thomas wants to admit. Furthermore, the nature of public schools (and even most private schools) today is far less serious than schools of the 19th century or before. Even if it weren't for the issue of compulsory schooling, schools have abdicated most of their traditional responsibility for moral instruction of students, and the SCOTUS is an inappropriate authority to try to undo that.
If you read the last paragraph of Thomas's dissent, it's clear he's more troubled with the laziness of the majority opinion than he is by the specific result. It reads like he wanted to really dig into the issues Alito raised in a concurring opinion, but didn't feel like he should because only Alito and Gorsuch concurred with that one, and debating those issues at length would be like bikeshedding. Maybe they were on the cusp of getting him to sign on, but they ran out of time and there were unresolved differences that led him to write the dissent.
Thomas's dissent should get everyone to think carefully about the scope of rights to discipline children in loco parentis in various circumstances. If you send your children to a friend's house, or with their friends' parents on some trip or to some event, you're granting those parents virtually unlimited ordinary disciplinary authority (subject to criminal and family law limitations). Voluntarily sending your kids to school could be seen (and, as Thomas points out, was historically seen) to create much the same dynamic.
For those interested, the Free Law Project maintains podcasts & RSS feeds of oral arguments in front of the both the Supreme Court and all the district appellate courts. They are a great listen. I especially enjoy going into them without any prior knowledge of the cases.
Its not clear to me why it is permissible for schools to ever punish children for nonviolent speech in the united states, the fact that it's even up for debate calls into question if the constitution still is the highest law of the land. I don't see the part where the rights only kick in once you are 18.
Although it's not strictly about age (kids who go to private/home school cannot have their speech regulated by the government in any special way), the fact is that the vast majority of kids in the US do go to public schools. These schools can regulate speech like employers can — but the difference is that no one is required to work for a specific employer for 12 years.
The Court was trying to find a balance that allows schools to prevent kids from going around spewing expletives all day long without consequence, while at the same time not treading too heavily on the legitimate free speech rights of students.
BTW, what do you mean when you say "nonviolent speech"? Are you referring to calls to violence, or the more recent concept (not recognized by the courts) that certain speech is itself violence?
I mean the stuff that is already impermissible for adults to say, calls for violence etc.
I totally understand the practical implications and what they are trying to do, I just don't understand how it's legal without a constitutional amendment.
The power Americans attribute to bad words has always astounded me. This is such a non issue here (France), I can't even think of a case where anyone has been punished, scolded or otherwise criticized for swearing. (There's standards for broadcasting, but they don't apply to single words, and in fact you could run afoul of them without saying a single bad word, while George Carlin's seven words routine would be absolutely uncontroversial.)
At worst, swearing too much will paint you as uneducated or abrasive, but in fact if someone complained about it they would be more likely to be criticized.
I felt the same way too until I realized why. The words you use are used to signal what group you belong to, it is a type of tribal identification. Certain words in the English lexicon are associated with racism and racists and so by using them people believe it signals membership in a particular tribe.
The next step is simply that one tribal group will attempt to target anyone who uses certain words for punishment not because of the word itself but because you indicate you are part of a different tribe and therefore must be punished.
Ultimately it is an abandonment of the principle of governance by law and instead replaces society with a system of tribal warfare.
> At worst, swearing too much will paint you as uneducated or abrasive,
This is the rationale for punishing children for saying the words. American parents often do not want their children participating in an environment where those words are socially normalized, and so, school staff prohibit the behavior.
Depending on the particular word and its usage, it may be language that inherently bullies other children too -- also not behavior that American parents want school staff to tolerate.
It is illegal in France to insult someone on the basis of their race, sex, etc., etc. Even non-public speech of that type. 500 Euro fine. Up to 3000 Euro for repeat offenses.
I believe a couple provinces of France still have blasphemy laws.
And, then there is Holocaust denial...
For better or worse, the US legal system is far more liberal than France’s when it comes to speech. (As for the relative sensitivity of individual citizens of either country to foul language, I don’t know. Depends where you are, I guess.)
I think you're misreading the SCOTUS case: the issue at hand was that she bad mouthed the team she was on, not "bad words" in a vacuum. If, in France, I had published a video describing a teacher with "bad words" that became known to the high school, I'd have certainly expected consequences on school grounds.
No, I did not misunderstand the issue. I understand the issue is not strictly speaking the bad words. However I suspect that, had she used non taboo words to say the same thing, she wouldn't have been punished.
That's possible, but isn't that true in France (and presumably other countries) as well and relatively reasonable? "Bad words" have more impact and power, by design.
If I publish a public video where I say that "M. Untel est un professeur très injuste" ("Mr. So-and-so is very unfair"), no problem, "M. Untel est un fils de pute" ("Mr. So-and-so is an asshole"), consequences.
It's not that bad words don't matter, it's that people don't care nowhere as much as in the US. You can say shit and fuck (merde, nique) in, say, a business meeting without getting fired, it's just that it's usually not a good idea.
You can say nègre in France depending on the context, referentially for example. As in "il ne faut pas traiter quelqu'un de nègre" which means "you should not call someone a n....r."
Right but if you say the french equivalent of "you fucking n-word" to your teacher, nothing happens? I find that hard to believe.
Stepping away from race for a second because it probably is needlessly complicating this, you would not get in trouble in a french school for saying the french equivalent of "fuck you, you lazy piece of shit" to your teacher?
> Right but if you say the french equivalent of "you fucking n-word" to your teacher, nothing happens
No, that's exactly the opposite of what I said. In the US you have to circumlocute your way around saying the word in all circumstances, even when it's not used in a derogatory / insulting way (such as referentially, or even because it sounds that way, see "niggardly" and "nega nega" incidents.) Insulting someone is insulting someone. Saying "go get sexually penetrated you inferior race person" is offensive whether you use a taboo word or not.
Let's be clear here. The school board is a bunch of fucking muppets. Children swear. They express disappointment in poor ways. They're children. It's the schools job to know that and react with compassion and guidance, not removing a student from school for a year.
It's not clear to me that a school should have the ability to punish people at all for off campus actions, let alone that this punishment is proportional to the event.
This case is only about the schools ability to exercise arbitrary power over its students, and it was willing to take that to the supreme court-- something which is incredibly rare and expensive over something absolutely mundane and everyday.
> The Court was trying to find a balance that allows schools to prevent kids from going around spewing expletives all day long without consequence, while at the same time not treading too heavily on the legitimate free speech rights of students.
Spewing expletives all day long without consequence is a right, guaranteed by the first amendment. If the school system doesn't like it, it's free to relocate to a country where free speech laws don't apply.
I still don't understand why this went all the way to the supreme court. It's such a clear-cut case of free speech. Some school admin's reading comprehension must be really poor if they couldn't make sense of the first sentence of the constitution.
> I still don't understand why this went all the way to the supreme court. It's such a clear-cut case of free speech.
The previous Supreme Court precedent (Tinker, [1]) was from 1969, and it wasn't clear how it should/would apply in the case of digital speech. For example, a student can be off-campus and tweet something that is instantaneously seen by hundreds of students who are on-campus. It wasn't clear how Tinker's framework would apply to this, since twitter and other platforms for remote speech didn't exist at that time.
Students don't (and shouldn't) have the right to disrupt the classroom with their speech. Like, you can't just go and yell expletives in a Wendy's and expect to not get kicked out, and IMO the same should apply to classrooms (even though it's the government that is enforcing these rules here, rather than private property owners).
I wouldn't call the latter an entirely new concept, it seems to have supplanted the concept of 'fighting words' - though that was speech that necessitated violence, the place it held in society was largely the same.
>Its not clear to me why it is permissible for schools to ever punish children for nonviolent speech in the united states,
One principle used to restrict free speech on school campus is about being "disruptive" to the class. E.g. Public schools banned kids from wearing the Confederate flag on shirts because they were "disruptive". In some cases, the free speech advocates fought the rule and yet the ban was upheld by courts even on appeal:
I can see kicking them out of school and removing the compulsory requirement that they attend, but the "you must go here, and while here this speech is illegal" doesn't line up with my reading of the first amendment.
If I was king I'd declare the whole country a school where criticism of me is banned.
In Tinker the supreme court ruled that schools can limit SOME speech ON/around school premises under narrow circumstances. However, in this case, Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. - B.L. was not on school grounds at the time, simply references school. The Defence in Mahanoy vs B.L. actually tried to muddle in the standard test under Tinker of "substantial disruption" to this case, but the court basically told them to kick rocks on that.
Currently, you are required to attend a school, but are not required to attend a public school. On top of that, the speech is absolutely not illegal. You cannot face criminal sanctions for the speech, just school related discipline.
If you withdraw from the school, you are free from detention. All punishments at a school that are short of expulsion are enforced primarily with the threat of expulsion.
There are truancy laws, and these vary greatly from state to state. However, not showing up for detention does not typically make one a truant; only being absent during regular hours.
I'm more surprised you think that compulsion has an impact on whether the first amendment protects you or not: no one is forcing you to be in any given public square, yet the first amendment protects you while there. On the flip side, it's compulsory for you to show up to jury duty, yet your freedom of speech is severely limited in that case.
"Free speech if and only if you leave" is not really free speech, is it?
Good point. Another question is forcing someone to go somewhere and work day in and day out without convicting them of a crime is acceptable under the 13th amendment but I didn't want to muddy the waters too much.
America resolves it's social issues via separate entities that take a long time to muddle through and together. Very rarely do Americans make sweeping changes quickly, mostly because the system is designed to prevent that. In that it's a relatively young country it's unsurprising that it takes this long to resolve a lot of edge cases via real world incidents, and then make them case law, case law being the vast majority of Americas law. The process to get to the supreme court, and have that case settled, becoming case law, and therefore effectively the law of the land, can take a long time. The laws at the time of the uniting of the states are very broad and subject to evolving interpretation. This is all by design. It wasn't so long ago that the states of the Americas were not united, and some might argue they still have some way to go until they are, if they ever will be.
"Still?" The answer used to be "of course schools can punish children for speech". The constitution does not have, or at least traditionally has not had, the relevance to random school affairs you think it has. If anything its influence is increasing.
The answer also used to be "of course schools aren't government-run daycare"; but here we are. It may not be the importance of the constitution which is changing.
Under historical common law, schools are in loco parentis- they absolutely were "government-run daycare" in the sense that they had many of the same role, responsibilities and rights as parents.
Constitutional rights wouldn't have applied to local governments prior to the 14th amendment, so that's only about 100 years. And until Brown v. Board, the court was wrong on the 14th amendment as well.
seems rather expansive. as the sibling comment notes, it wasn't relevant to the states for some time.
and until there was a nontrivial number of older students in state run schools, there wouldn't have even been opportunities for case law to arise. (mandatory) public schooling started with younger students and expanded from there.
(while children of any age should have their freedom of speech, i think we can both agree that as a practical matter, they're more likely to put it to use the older they get.)
This is pretty much my point, the influence of the Constitution has been increasing over time, not decreasing as the commenter to whom I originally replied seemed to imply.
I don't know why you would use any but the longest available timeline when considering whether the Constitution is "still the law of the land". It's an inherently from-the-start kind of question.
I've read it before. It mentions that the state must prove that the speech is disruptive to the administration of the school. The trouble there is the first amendment doesn't have that language. Further the type of speech that is disruptive to the administration of the school can also be the sort of speech the first amendment is there to protect. Under this standard a student who is molested by a faculty member may be forbidden from speaking out about it publicly as it is "disruptive to the administration".
> under this standard a student who is molested by a faculty member may be forbidden from speaking out about it publicly as it is "disruptive to the administration"
That's a leap. "Disruptive" was defined within the context of the facts and circumstances of that case. Courts are about balancing rights, in this case, the rights of students to receive a public education and the rights of students to speak freely under the First Amendment. This case narrowed the definition, ever so slightly, of what is and isn't "disruptive" within the meaning of this law.
The Constitution doesn't restrict local governments nearly as much as it does the federal government. And, of course, at least some schools are private and even less restricted because of that.
Even here, I'm surprised by the free speech advocacy of the justices. It doesn't seem consistent with plenty of other rules that are allowed to stand. This school could have punished the same cheerleader for the same words if she'd said them in class or even at practice. As far as I can tell, she was only protected because the school can't punish her for what she says totally outside of school property and activities.
The wording of the decision makes it sound like you're free to speak profanely anywhere and anytime you want, but schools clearly punish people for profanity all the time and that's never been stopped.
Yes, it does. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments [1] incorporate much of the Bill of Rights against the states. Local governments are creatures of the state; SCOTUS has long found that local governments have been incorporated against as well.
Constitutional protections are never absolute. e.g. yelling fire in a crowded theater, the 2nd amendment and WMDs, or practicing a religion that requires human sacrifice. (Even animal sacrifice might be prohibited, I don't know.)
... is not and never has been an exception to the constitution. It was written as part of a dissent which has been thoroughly ignored and repudiated except by people who don't understand the first thing about US law.
It is technically incorrect (or at least, untested to the current standard), but it's a useful and more understandable approximate than the technically correct "imminent lawless action"... and a lot more palatable than quoting the KKK leader whose case set that standard.
Granted that decision was later partially overturned, but the general principle that the first amendment protections are not absolute remains in force, and there are many extant examples: libel laws, laws barring false advertising, and laws against incitement of violence are all constitutional.
There is no law against yelling fire in a theatre.
The phrase was used by Justice Holmes in a boneheaded decision that upheld the illegality of objecting to the draft. Thankfully, the opinion was later overturned.
The very narrow point being made by the Supreme Court was there could be crimes-such as inciting imminent lawless action-that might be precipitated by speech. It’s not the speech that’s illegal... the crime is the intent to cause an immediate riot.
The same crime could be occasioned by storming into a theater with a gun and scaring the shit out of people.
In any case, the “yelling fire” trope isn’t accurate as it’s usually used.
As far as human sacrifice, there’s nothing inherently illegal about it. That is, if it’s legal for grandma to be euthanized, or legal for a convict to be executed, or legal for a baby to be aborted, it would make no difference legally if the participants considered the act part of some bizarro religion.
That there are practical limits is never in dispute. The question is always whether this instance is protected or falls under an exception, and should it be.
The analogy “fire in a crowded theater” was most famously used by Justice Holmes in 1919’s Schenck v. United States. Holmes used it to argue (and the court ruled that) protesting the military draft was a clear and present danger to the public tantamount to espionage.
Most people today, I think, would disagree. But the metaphor remains common, often used uncritically, without considering what speech it has been used to suppress in the past.
While students do absolutely have rights, schools are also tasked with caring with kids (especially during the school day). It's typically at the intersection of these rights and responsibilities where we see these cases make it to SCOTUS.
> Its not clear to me why it is permissible for schools to ever punish children for nonviolent speech in the united states
The most obvious counterexample would be speech that disrupts education. Why even have schools if one student can choose to talk and yell and disrupt class and not be punished for it?
She said bad things about the cheerleading team. The team decided to not have her as a cheerleader anymore. The school is a sideshow to all this. She wasn't punished by being put in detention or any other school related activity. Not sure how this is "punishing children".
I hope that this ruling applies to UT Knoxville too.
They kicked out a student and cheerleader based on false accusation of her using "a derogatory racist slur" in a leaked private conversation. (She said "nigga".)
Well cool_dude85 claims it is a racist slur, when the reality is that it can be a racist slur, which I would argue (and you seem to agree) is not the same thing.
The context being the video in that linked article? Certainly wasn't enough context for me to make such a determination. I have no idea if she was using that word to talk about black people in general, her black friends, her white friends, herself, or something else entirely. Much less if it was being used in a derogatory manner.
I'm not sure I follow? Are you saying the context here is that she is white and that is therefore enough for it to automatically be derogatory racist usage? That sounds... racist.
That's a question that is sociological in nature, and far beyond the scope of the well-defined linguistic meaning of the word, which was what I was commenting on.
Yeah, I can't even really hear the whole word in the linked video, to be honest, but that sounds like a "hard r" to me... scrolls the thread yeah she definitely didn't say "nigga."
on a side note, it is becoming a rare occasion that the ACLU is involved in a free speech issue and arguing for free speech, and they are using it to sell merch.
they raked in hundreds of millions from trump resistance libs over the last couple years, yet their number of lawyers that specialize in free speech is the same as a decade ago: 4! four.
Because it's a public school. It would not apply to private schools or private employers.
Also note that this is a narrow ruling; the supreme court is not intending to set new precedent the way Tinker vs. Des Moines did. They just said this particular student's particular speech in this particular context was protected, not all speech by all students. This case won't be relevant to schools banning hate speech or bullying on social media, for instance. Nor would it have any consequences for public employers.
There is a larger question here. Tinker, the existing precedent, was established long before social media. There will have to be a reckoning, the court will need to decide what speech on social media is protected and what isn't. Speech on social media is (by virtue of this decision) more protected than on campus speech, but less protected than speech by an adult who's not a student at the school. There's a line in there somewhere, and it's the court's duty to draw it. They did not draw that line today; they just said that the line is over there somewhere and saying "fuck" on social media didn't cross it.
"There is a larger question here." Which is the point of Thomas's dissent. He does an excellent job outlining just how poor a job the court did with this decision. It starts on page 34: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/20-255_g3bi.pdf
It isn't their duty to draw the line immediately, but they will need to draw a line. The attention that this case received is evidence of that. Nobody really cares about whether or not Brandi was on the cheerleading team at Mahoney High School, but we do care very much about where the line is.
> It isn't their duty to draw the line immediately, but they will need to draw a line.
Ok, so then there is no problem with this decision. Edge cases can be handled when they come up, and there isn't a problem with the fact that this decision did not address every single possible circumstance.
What happens if a rival sports team uses bigoted slurs to degrade a rival team on social media? Could the players still be suspended from games? Or would the coach and league be powerless to create an atmosphere of good sportsmanship? I rarely agree with Justice Thomas, but he was good to dissent with a more targeted opinion.
I think this was the right move. Unless you're threatening violence, harm, self harm, or engaging in bullying, the schools have no business trying to regulate student speech off campus. I never saw this as anything more than a power move by the schools.
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