9th Circuit Refuses to Rehear Student's Free-Speech Case
by Jim Brown
August 9, 2006
(AgapePress) - - A federal appeals court has denied a request to rehear the case of a California student who was suspended by his high school for wearing a T-shirt expressing his opposition to homosexuality.
The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected an appeal for the full court to hear the case of Chase Harper, who was banned from wearing a T-shirt that read, "Homosexuality is shameful" and "Our school embraced what God has condemned."
The Ninth Circuit's Judge Stephen Reinhardt said Harper's T-shirt message was equivalent to wearing a shirt that says "Hide your sisters -- the blacks are coming." The judge went on to say that allowing such messages violates the U.S. Supreme Court's precedent in the 1969 Tinker case (Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District).
Tim Chandler, an attorney for Harper, says the analogy used by Reinhardt is "entirely inappropriate" since any reasonable person should be able to understand the distinction between the judge's example and the actual message on Harper's shirt. The high school student's lawyer feels Reinhardt was making a faulty comparison.
"There's a difference," Chandler insists, "between talking about a controversial political and religious issue that our society as a whole is currently debating -- that being the issue of homosexuality and same-sex marriage -- and comparing it with racism and essentially slavery, which has been universally condemned in our society."
The decision by the Ninth Circuit is an example of "political correctness over constitutional correctness," the attorney contends. "As the dissent properly noted, this case is both unsupportable and unprecedented in the law," he says.
Also, in Judge Reinhardt's decision, the judge "accuses the dissent of not understanding the Tinker case and what it stands for and yet doesn't cite a single case that supports his view," Chandler asserts. "I think that that's just demonstrative of the fact that this is a huge infringement on the First Amendment that no court has ever taken before," he says.
A federal district court originally upheld Harper's First Amendment claims before the Ninth Circuit Court rejected them. Chandler says he has not yet decided whether to appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
