Tag: 1st amendment

Texas school suspends Black student more than two weeks for purportedly lengthy dreadlocks

Barbers Hill High School in Mont Belvieu, Texas punished a Black student named Darryl George with more than two weeks of in-school suspension — for having dreadlocks.

“School officials said his dreadlocks fell below his eyebrows and ear lobes and violated the district’s dress code,” reported Cheyanne Mumphrey and Juan Lozano for the Associated Press. “George, 17, has been suspended since Aug. 31 at the Houston-area school. He was in tears when he was suspended Monday despite his family’s arguments that his hair does not violate the dress code, his mother Darresha George said.”

“He has to sit on a stool for eight hours in a cubicle,” the mother told the AP. “That’s very uncomfortable. Every day he’d come home, he’d say his back hurts because he has to sit on a stool.” She added that her son has grown dreadlocks for over 10 years and the family has never been harassed or received complaints about it until now.

This incident comes just as Texas enacted its own state version of the CROWN Act, a law that prohibits discrimination based on various racially-associated hairstyles like dreadlocks, braids, or Afros. The Georges pointed out the new law to school officials, but the principal and vice principal reportedly said that the law does not protect the length of hair.

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California To Drop ‘Medical Misinformation’ Law After Judge Blasts ‘Dramatic Examples’

California has quietly announced it’s ditching Gov. Gavin Newsom’s draconian ‘Covid-19 medical misinformation’ law, which would threaten the licenses of doctors who don’t agree with “scientific consensus” on various issues.

The law, AB 2098, was signed into law by Newsom last year. In response, five doctors alleged it to be unconstitutional under the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the US constitution.

The five doctors, Tracy Hoeg, Ram Duriseti, Aaron Kheriaty, Pete Mazolewski, and Azadeh Khatibi, argued that the law prevents them from providing information to their patients that may contradict what the law permits or prohibits. They also alleged the law was used to intimidate and punish physicians who disagreed with prevailing views on COVID-19.

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Ninth Circuit rebukes lawmakers, grants injunction against California law targeting gun marketing

A California law ostensibly aimed at restricting the marketing of firearms to minors infringes on the free speech rights of adults, according to a three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. In its ruling handed down on Thursday morning, the panel vacated a lower court decision denying an injunction against the law’s enforcement and delivered a resounding win for both First and Second Amendment advocates.

Writing for the majority, Judge Kenneth Lee ruled that the law forbidding marketing and advertising firearms that “reasonably appear to be attractive to minors” is likely to infringe on the First Amendment, given that the statute is so broadly written that advertisements aimed at adults who can lawfully purchase a firearm would be swept up in its provisions.

While California has a substantial interest in reducing gun violence and unlawful use of firearms by minors, its law does not “directly” and “materially” further either goal. California cannot straitjacket the First Amendment by, on the one hand, allowing minors to possess and use firearms and then, on the other hand, banning truthful advertisements about that lawful use of firearms. There is no evidence in the record that a minor in California has ever unlawfully bought a gun, let alone because of an ad. Nor has the state produced any evidence that truthful ads about lawful uses of guns—like an ad about hunting rifles in Junior Sports Magazines’ Junior Shooters—encourage illegal or violent gun use among minors. Simply put, California cannot lean on gossamers of speculation to weave an evidence-free narrative that its law curbing the First Amendment “significantly” decreases unlawful gun use among minors. The First Amendment demands more than good intentions and wishful thinking to warrant the government’s muzzling of speech.

California’s law is also more extensive than necessary, as it sweeps in truthful ads about lawful use of firearms for adults and minors alike. For instance, an advertisement directed at adults featuring a camouflage skin on a firearm might be illegal because minors may be attracted to it.

While the state of California had argued that the statute didn’t violate the First Amendment given the broader latitude given to regulations on commercial speech, the panel was unswayed, with Lee writing that even under a lowered standard of intermediate scrutiny the law fails to pass constitutional muster in light of the fact that the “state has made no showing that broadly prohibiting certain truthful firearm-related advertising is sufficiently tailored to significantly advance the state’s goals of preventing gun violence and unlawful firearm possession among minors.”

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Police Tore Up His Protest Sign. Now They Owe Him $50,000

Last year, Delaware police prevented 54-year-old Jonathan Guessford from holding a sign warning drivers about a speed trap and wrongfully cited him for “improper hand signal” after he flipped off the officers who seized and tore up his sign. Police have now agreed to pay Guessford $50,000 as part of a settlement reached in a lawsuit alleging that police violated his civil rights.

Following several run-ins with the police, Guessford decided to “stage protests whenever he saw police officers stopping unsuspected vehicles using a radar gun,” according to legal documents. On March 11, 2022, his protest consisted of standing by the side of the road, holding a homemade sign reading, “Radar Ahead!” Guessford was soon confronted by several Delaware State Police officers, who took his sign and tore it up.

As Guessford drove away after the encounter, he flipped off the officers, leading them to eventually cite him for “improper hand signal” under a statute governing hand signals for nonmotorized vehicles like bicycles. However, body camera footage showed that officers knew that the citation was incongruous and would likely be dropped.

“Yeah, you can’t do that. That’ll get dropped,” Officer Christopher Popp said during a phone call to another officer, who replied, referring to a third officer, “I told him that’s going to get thrown out….Eventually, [Guessford is] going to do something really stupid, and then we are going to be able to really lock him up.”

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SCOTUS’ Ruling in Gay Wedding Website Case Was a Defeat for Compelled Speech

The government may not compel someone to “create speech she does not believe,” the Supreme Court ruled in June. In a 6–3 opinion authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the Court sided with a graphic designer, Lorie Smith, who wanted to expand into the wedding website business without being forced by Colorado law to create products celebrating same-sex marriages.

Back in 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit found that the planned websites would each constitute “an original, customized creation,” designed by Smith with a goal of celebrating the couple’s “unique love story.” As such, it said, they “qualify as ‘pure speech’ protected by the First Amendment.” The appeals court admitted that Smith was willing to provide her services to anyone as long as the substance of the project did not contradict her values. It also recognized that “Colorado’s ‘very purpose’ in seeking to apply its law to Ms. Smith” was to stamp out dissenting ideas about marriage.

Despite all of that, the 10th Circuit held that the state government was within its authority to compel her to create such websites. Lamenting “an unfortunate tendency by some to defend First Amendment values only when they find the speaker’s message sympathetic,” Gorsuch et al. concluded otherwise.

The ruling in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis is neither as narrow nor as broad as it (theoretically) could have been. The Court did not do away with public accommodations laws or allow businesses to discriminate against customers on the basis of characteristics such as skin color or national origin. But it did note that “public accommodations statutes can sweep too broadly when deployed to compel speech.”

The high court also did not establish a right for any and every business owner to decline to provide services for same-sex weddings—only those whose services involve expressive activity. Whether a particular service (say, cake baking) is expressive will have to be litigated case by case.

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That School Is Still Treading on Jaiden Rodriguez’s Free Speech Rights

The case of 12-year-old Jaiden Rodriguez is not quite closed. While the Vanguard School’s board of directors has declared that he may sport a “don’t tread on me” patch on his backpack, a closer look at the school district’s policies suggests that administrators are still inclined to tread all over Rodriguez’s free speech rights.

That’s according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a First Amendment advocacy organization. FIRE spoke with Jaiden’s mother, who said that contrary to the board’s public statement, a district official—Mike Claudio, assistant superintendent of Harrison School District Two in Colorado Springs, Colorado—told her that her son would only be allowed to display the Gadsden flag patch as long as no one else complained about it.

Moreover, Rodriguez is still prohibited from displaying a secondary patch that references the Firearms Policy Coalition and expresses support for the Second Amendment. The justification for this restriction is the district’s categorical ban on content having to do with alcohol, drugs, tobacco, and weapons.

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FSC Secures Preliminary Injunction Against Unconstitutional Texas Law

Free Speech Coalition and our co-plaintiffs, a coalition of major adult platforms and creators, have been granted a preliminary injunction against the Texas antiporn law, HB1181. Texas is blocked from enforcing the law while the case is litigated.

“This is a huge and important victory against the rising tide of censorship online,” says Alison Boden, Executive Director of Free Speech Coalition. “From the beginning, we have argued that the Texas law, and those like it, are both dangerous and unconstitutional. We’re pleased that the Court agreed with our view that HB1181’s true purpose is not to protect young people, but to prevent Texans from enjoying First Amendment protected expression. The state’s defense of the law was not based in science or technology, but ideology and politics.”

The Court agreed with FSC and our co-plaintiffs on nearly every argument:

  • The law violates First Amendment rights of creators and consumers
  • The law has a chilling effect on legally-protected speech
  • Parental filters are a less restrictive and more effective method of protecting minors
  • The state does not have the right to compel speech in the form of health warnings

HB 1181 required sites with adult content to force their visitors to provide digital IDs or other official proof of age, as well as display pseudoscientific “health” warnings. Free Speech Coalition and our co-plaintiffs argued that the requirements are unconstitutional and expose consumers to significant privacy risks.

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Docs Offer Glimpse Inside Censorship Industrial Complex

Welcome to the Censorship Industrial Complex. It’s rather like the old “military industrial complex,” which was shorthand for the military, private companies, and academia working together to achieve U.S. battlefield dominance, with the R&D funded by the government that buys the final product.

But the censorship industrial complex builds algorithms, not bombers. The players aren’t Raytheon and Boeing, but social media companies, tech startups, and universities and their institutes. The foes to be dominated are American citizens whose opinions diverge from government narratives on issues ranging from COVID-19 responses to electoral fraud to transgenderism.

When first exposed a few months ago, many of the actors and their media defenders perversely claimed that they, as private entities, were acting out of concern for “democracy” and exercising their own First Amendment rights.

However, the records and correspondence of an advisory committee to an obscure government agency tell a different story. The Functional Government Initiative (FGI) has obtained through a public records request documents of the Cybersecurity Advisory Committee of the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The committee was composed of academics and tech company officials working with government personnel in a much closer relationship than either they or the media want to admit. Several advisory committee members who appear throughout the documents as quasi-federal actors are among those loudly protesting that they were private actors when censoring lawful American speech (e.g., Kate Starbird, Vijaya Gadde, Alex Stamos).

But the advisory committee members met often and worked so closely with their government handlers that the federal liaison to the committee regularly offered members his personal cell phone and even reminded them to use the committee’s Slack channel. Your average concerned citizen doesn’t have a Homeland Security bureaucrat on speed dial.

What were they working on? CISA’s “Mis-, Dis-, and Mal-information” (MDM) subcommittee discussed Orwellian “social listening” and “monitoring,” and considered the government’s best censorship “success metrics.” Who was to be censored? CISA was formed in response to misinformation campaigns from foreign actors, but it evolved toward domestic “threats.” Meeting notes record that Suzanne Spaulding of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said they shouldn’t “solely focus on addressing foreign threats … [but] to emphasize that domestic threats remain and while attribution is sometimes unclear, CISA should be sensitive to domestic distinctions, but cannot focus too heavily on such limitations.” So CISA should combat “high-volume disinformation purveyors before the purveyor is attributed to a domestic or foreign threat” and not worry so much about First Amendment niceties.

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Louisiana Man Arrested By SWAT Team For Facebook Joke About COVID-19 Wins Case

In a pivotal defense of free speech and online expression, the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals has rendered a verdict upholding Waylon Bailey’s right to jest about COVID-19 and zombies on social media. The Louisiana resident, previously arrested under the cloud of an anti-terrorism law for his humorous Facebook post, now sees the tide of justice turn in his favor.

We obtained a copy of the decision for you here.

Waylon Bailey’s playful jab at the pandemic combined with a cinematic reference to the Brad Pitt-led movie “World War Z,” whimsically warning that the local sheriff’s office was tasked with shooting the “infected.”

Instead of discerning the evident satire, the local sheriff’s deputies responded with a disproportionate use of force. Without obtaining a warrant, the authorities dispatched a SWAT team to Bailey’s residence, arresting him with guns drawn in his own garage.

While the ludicrous charge against Bailey was soon dismissed upon a prosecutor’s intervention, the subsequent civil-rights lawsuit encountered unexpected setbacks. Astonishingly, the district court not only granted the arresting deputy qualified immunity but also dismissed Bailey’s First Amendment right to jest.

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Student Refuses School’s Order to Remove American Flags from Truck, Switches to Homeschooling

A Virginia teen said his First Amendment rights are being violated after school officials told him to remove the two American flags mounted on his red Toyota Tacoma truck.

Staunton River High School officials told senior Christopher Hartless that the patriotic display was a distraction to other drivers and a safety concern, WSET reported.

“I don’t understand how it’s a distraction if they have one on the flagpole that every other student can see,” Hartless told the news outlet.

His parking pass was revoked. His stepmother, Christina Kingery, said she didn’t want him to take the bus, so his family took him out of the high school and is homeschooling him.

Officials from the high school’s Bedford County school district in  released a statement noting that flying flags on vehicles is against “the student parking contract” that Hartless apparently signed, “which has been used by all 3 of our high schools for many years.”

The school district released a statement regarding the incident to parents regarding the school district’s code of conduct rules:

The BCPS Code of Student Conduct prohibits “Attire that has language or images that are offensive, profane, vulgar, discriminatory, or racially/culturally divisive. This would include confederate flags, swastikas, KKK references, or any other images that might reasonably be considered hurtful or intimidating to others.” It does not include wearing clothing with American flag logos or prints on attire. This attire is allowed.

The statement also noted to parents that the Pledge of Allegiance is recited every morning.

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