Students Urged to Proudly Wear Their Pro-Life Message on Tuesday
by Jim Brown
April 26, 2004
(AgapePress) - Thousands of America's public school students will be voicing their support on Tuesday for the sanctity of human life.Tomorrow is the second annual "National Pro-Life T-Shirt Day" sponsored by Rock for Life, a subsidiary of the American Life League. Students are being encouraged to don T-shirts that display pro-life messages, such as one offered Rock for Life that shows an image of an baby in the womb and the statement: "Do you really believe this isn't a baby? Abortion is homicide."
In recent years, students wearing pro-life clothing have encountered resistance from school officials who have stated that wearing a pro-life shirt is equivalent to wearing a swastika or using obscene language. The Thomas More Law Center in Michigan has represented some of those students and defended their rights to voice their pro-life stand. At no charge, the Center has vowed to continue to defend the free-speech rights of pro-life students who are told by school officials to remove their T-shirts.
Center attorney Ed White has a simple message for officials who are considering such action: don't do it.
"Students have a right to passively and non-disruptively express themselves with a positive message such as 'abortion is wrong,'" White says. "And if you do censor them -- and [if] we're contacted this student and their family -- we will defend that student's rights at no charge to them, no matter where it is in the United States."
The attorney says the courage of young pro-lifers has an impact on their peers. "What we've found in these situations is that after the student has his or her rights restored, other students then start wearing the same shirts to school," White says.
"So where we may have had a school with 2,000 kids where only one or two kids wore these shirts to school, after the incident gets publicity, maybe another 20 or 30 kids will show up [wearing] the shirts."
The Thomas More Law Center has defended students who have had their pro-life messages silenced in Virginia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, California, Texas, New Hampshire, New York, and Maine.
