Two Michigan middle-school boys wore sweatshirts bearing three words that contained no profanity: “Let’s Go Brandon.” School administrators made them take the shirts off anyway because everybody knew what the phrase meant.
Now the Supreme Court has decided not to get involved.
The justices declined Monday to hear the students’ First Amendment appeal, leaving intact a divided Sixth Circuit ruling that allowed Tri County Area Schools to treat the slogan as vulgar speech. A denial of review doesn’t mean the Supreme Court endorsed that reasoning. It does mean the two students lost their last chance to overturn it in their case.
From the Associated Press:
The school told her sons to take off the sweatshirts she bought them for Christmas in 2022.
Lower courts upheld the ban, finding the veiled vulgarity of the phrase allows schools to ban it. It functions as a stand-in for “F-— Joe Biden.”
The woman’s attorneys argued that the decision wrongly gives school officials wide latitude to squelch political speech based on their personal ideas of what is vulgar. The phrase itself doesn’t contain any swear words or sexual implications, they said.
The school district urged the justices to reject the case, arguing that messages with lewd implications have no place in school, even if they touch on political topics. There has been evidence that some students wore clothing that read “Make America Great Again” or had messages supporting President Donald Trump, a Republican who lost the 2020 election to Biden, a Democrat.
