by Rusty Pugh
(AgapePress) – An attorney with the American Family Association says a Washington school district may have gone too far when it threatened to suspend a 15-year-old girl for wearing a T-shirt bearing a pro-life message.
Andrea Lawyer, a freshman in Prosser, Washington, was called into the principal's office and told to turn the shirt inside-out or face suspension. The shirt reads “Abortion is homicide” on the front, and on the back, “You will not silence my message. You will not mock my God. You will hear my cry and stop killing my generation.”
Lawyer describes herself as a Christian who is pro-life. She maintains a 3.7 grade point average and is active in many school activities. She told school officials that the shirt did not promote sex, violence, or drugs, and she felt it was appropriate. But even though the shirt did not violate the school's dress code, Lawyer was told the shirt's pro-life message was “too strong.”
Brian Fahling is an attorney and constitutional expert with the Center for Law & Policy, the legal arm of the American Family Association. Fahling says the school district is wrong.
“The school officials … are treading on very thin ice if they believe they can fashion a policy which would somehow regulate the power of a statement that a student might be making on a T-shirt,” Fahling says. “In fact, I think it's an impossibility because what that amounts to is viewpoint discrimination in its purest sense.”
According to Fahling, the district can do nothing in terms of a policy that could prevent that same statement from being made. “It seems to me an absurd notion that you can somehow measure the degree or depth with which a statement is made, and make objective judgments then about whether or not it ought to be permitted,” he says.
Fahling says the Supreme Court has already addressed this issue “frequently and loudly,” and in the end, he believes the school will be forced to drop it.
(This update courtesy of Agape Press.)
