Why can’t people understand this…
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I mean, as a straight, what exactly do I have to be proud of? It’s not like I had to struggle to figure that out about myself, to come out to anyone about it, to be brave against any prejudice for it. It’s not anything I chose or did or even want, it’s just the stupid way I happened to turn out.
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Totally agree, it’s easy to tell. But here’s the problem. We’re talking about a public school. “Yeah, I know this is punching down, it’s easy to tell” doesn’t work. No. What a public school needs to do is:
- Write a policy that spells all this out, in a way that’s legal and legally defensible
- Have staff members apply and enforce this policy
- Defend this policy in court, if necessary. And we all know, there are right wing legal activists who look forward to challenging policies in court
Right wing groups know all this stuff. Some right wing group a couple years ago went around putting up signs at a university that said, “Islam is right about women”. How does an administrator react to that one? How do you write up a policy to deal with that? How would you defend such a policy in court? Those aren’t real questions, because there’s no answer to any of that.
Answer is really simple, we either need to delete the first amendment (literally amend the constitution) so we can end all the court cases over such things, or have a policy that allows free speech, or have a policy that prohibits all expressions of messages in a public school.
This stuff is only complicated at public entities like public schools. Private schools have far more flexibility.
Or, far easier and yet to be tried, people could just stop being cunts to queer people.
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You take that shit down. Not fucking difficult here. It’s bigoted all around - it’s obviously bigoted towards women. It’s bigoted towards Muslims, because it ASSUMES that they are all retrograde about women, which is far from correct, in part because it makes broadbased assumptions about about a billion people. It very much crosses the line.
No. The First Amendment was never meant to allow ALL forms of speech. We still regulate speech, but the government is more limited in how it can regulate speech. Plus, of course, you’re forgetting that 1A also has the establishment clause, which says that the state and public institutions can’t establish a religion or show favoritism towards one faith or another (or the lack thereof). Individuals can get together for religious study on school property or express their faith (as long as it does not attack others - wearing a cross, that’s kosher, wearing a shirt about how LGBQT+ are “evil” or whatever, crossing the line). The school can not force everyone to participate in a religious event (at least until the recent SCOTUS decision about that coach).
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It should have been a “zero fifths” compromise, but no, the southern states just had to be given more political power…
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Yet, once again, every other modern democracy manages it just fine. 
Non-Americans get really weary of the “everything we’re doing wrong isn’t solvable” attitude that Americans tend to default to all the time.
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And yet public schools all over the United States manage to do it all the time. You are confusing speech by the school with speech not allowed in the school. Yes, if the school had a policy of flying the pride flag outside on their own flagpole they would run into trouble if they picked and chose which flags to fly. What we are talking about here is not that. Here we are talking about a ban on a teacher putting a pride flag in their classroom on a student wearing pride wear to school. Schools all over the country have mechanisms to deal with this. They have policies that ban “disruptive” speech. It’s one of the it’s one of the ways schools are special in terms of the first amendment. They can do that. Other schools, like the school my child goes to, has made their policy to ban only disruptive speech. No. Profanity. No racist language. No language advocating for the hate of others. And then that’s pretty much it. They allow pride flags. They allow BLM flags.
This school could allow pride flags in the classroom. All they have to do is decide that their policy is to ban disruptive speech. Not to ban so-called political speech.
Seriously this is not that hard.
Edit for clarity. Damned text to speech
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Such bullshit.
They already have policies that cover it. No profanity, no sexually explicit language or imagery, and no hate.
The strawman example you cite would violate that third one. Pride flags don’t. BLM flags don’t.
There is no need for a test case in court. Assholes are going to object to perfectly good symbols for asshole teasons. Fight them.
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No, it isn’t. I may think the Log Cabin Republicans are fools, but I won’t deny their existence.
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