Webb City R-7 Caves In to ACLU

So sue me. :-) I was a tad busy when the Webb City R-7 School District caved in to pressure from the ACLU on June 24, 2005...ACLU Drops Censorship Suit, Webb City Allows T-shirts [N.B. This is the first of a series I plan on the ACLU's assault on the brakes on barbarianism that form the bulwark encouraging civilized behavior. Yeh, it's a multi-mixed metaphor. Have the ACLU sue me, OK?] It's yet another case of the barbarians inside the gates winning over civilized order. Is it really a censorship issue when rebellious teenagers are told what they can and cannot wear? Or is it yet another case of "Let the little barbarians say and do darned near anything they want"? Poor babies: they wanted to wear t-shirts promoting a homosexual lifestyle. Can no one see that promoting sex period is simply not proper behavior in school? Homo- or heterosex. Neither are appropriate things for kids to wear promotional billboards for in school. Where are the adults? (Especially the parents—oh, that's right, the parents are the ones breeding and raising the barbarians...) Ah, but since it's already OK, as far as society as a whole is concerned, for girls to dress like prostitutes in school and boys to dress like gangbangers, what's a little promotion of sexual promiscuity, let alone sexual perversion? (Well, the ACLU thinks those are all positive values: after all, it promotes NAMBLA activities and pornography as supposedly Constitutionally protected behavior... ) And in fact, the ACLU is consistent here: while the First Amendment was specifically written (according to its authors) to protect religious speech and practice and political speech and press, the ACLU has been at the forefront of convincing judges and, with the conivance of the courts and the media, most of America, that the First Amendment also applies to burning flags, to displays of crucifixes in urine and to promotion of a homosexual lifestyle in public schools. None of which can remotely be understood by any rational person as political or religious speech or press. *sigh* Do we have to stupidly let them continue to rewrite the rulebook to suit themselves? And the ACLU's adding of the argument that the harassment of the Webb City R-7 School District was also based on the Fourteenth Amendment is beyond ridiculous. Here's what Justice Black said in 1971 about a similar Fourteenth Amendment argument (concerning a case that was brought a few years after I graduated from Coronado High School where the "cause" of the case originated). The argument brought forward was that Due Process and/or Equal Protection (14th Amendment)clauses were violated when the school refused to allow a student to attend class because he refused to comply with the dress code, specifically referencing hair length for male students: "I refuse to hold for myself that the federal courts have constitutional power to interfere in this way with the public school system operated by the States. And I furthermore refuse to predict that our Court will hold they have such power. It is true that we have held that this Court does have power under the Fourteenth Amendment to bar state public schools from discriminating against Negro students on account of their race but we did so by virtue of a direct, positive command in the Fourteenth Amendment, which, like the other Civil War Amendments, was primarily designed to outlaw racial discrimination by the States. There is no such direct, positive command about local school rules with reference to the length of hair state school students must have.And I cannot now predict this Court will hold that the more or less vague terms of either the Due Process or Equal Protection Clause have robbed the States of their traditionally recognized power to run their school systems in accordance with their own best judgment as to the appropriate length of hair for students." _1_ It would seem to me that requiring haircuts would be more intrusive than clothing requirements, and so other courts have held over the years. _2_ Nevertheless, by threatening and actually filing costly lawsuits, the ACLU has been effective in quelling discipline in public schools, hampering the in loco parentis authority of teachers to the point that the inmates are pretty much running the sanitariums, now... (Well, between students who know that teachers have little or no authority and administrators with no balls-and even fewer brains to back up their eunuch state-it's no wonder our public schools are in the toilet... but that's another topic.) Just ask the question the ACLU doesn't want you to think about: Is wearing suggestive clothing really a First Amendment right? If so, does it apply to minors in a public school environment where the pubschool acts legally *in loco parentis*? Only in the minds of the Loony Left Moonbat Brigade, the Mass Media Podpeople's Army and their Felow Travelers and Useful Idiot Cohorts in the courts... Thanks to the Amerikan Communist "Liberation" Union and their ilk. See also this post on ACLU vs. civilized dress codes in school at Stop the ACLU-Oklahoma Crossposted from Stop the ACLU-Missouri