Last week, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit issued an opinion in the case of B.A. v. Tri County Area Schools, holding that school administrators did not violate the First Amendment rights of students by requiring them to remove clothing emblazoned with the phrase “Let’s Go Brandon.” While students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate,” Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. Cmty. Sch. Dist., 393 U.S. 503, 506 (1969), the Supreme Court has recognized several exceptions to this standard. Schools have the power to prohibit speech on campus that is indecent, lewd, or vulgar; promotes illegal drug use; or may be reasonably perceived as having the school’s stamp of approval. The issue in this case was whether a euphemism for an allegedly vulgar message—“Let’s Go Brandon” is a phrase popular on the Internet as a stand-in for the words “Fuck Joe Biden”—may be prohibited by school officials. “[V]ulgarity trumps politics,” according to the court, “[a]nd the protection for political speech doesn’t give a student carte blanche to use vulgarity at school—even when that vulgarity is cloaked in innuendo or euphemism.” Therefore, the court found that the school did not violate the Constitution by demanding the removal of the students’ clothing that says “Let’s Go Brandon.”
NCAC previously filed an amicus brief in the case, arguing that allowing restrictions on students’ use of euphemistic, non-disruptive, political speech would give school officials wide latitude to silence viewpoints they find objectionable, a result at odds with the very purpose of the First Amendment. Writing in dissent, Judge John K. Bush similarly argued that “[t]he majority essentially gives school administrators boundless discretion… to redefine facially non-vulgar speech as vulgarity in order to ban it.”