Wednesday morning the Supreme Court sided with a student who claimed her Pennsylvania high school violated her First Amendment rights. The court ruled 8-1 in favor of Brandi Levy who was suspended from Mahanoy Area High School’s junior varsity cheerleading team after sending two profanity-heavy messages on Snapchat criticizing the school while away from school grounds.
According to The Hill:
“F— school f— softball f— cheer f— everything,” the 14-year-old wrote in a 2017 post on Snapchat alongside a picture of herself and a friend with raised middle fingers. Levy sent the Snap on a weekend while at a convenience store.
The post eventually made its way to the school’s cheerleading coaches, who suspended Levy from the junior varsity cheering squad for a year, prompting her lawsuit against Mahanoy Area High School in rural Pennsylvania.
The 8-1 ruling could have considerable implications for student’s First Amendment rights in a time dominated by social media that has blurred the lines between on-and-off campus speech.
CNBC reports:
The justices had weighed whether a 1969 court decision, which held that public schools have the ability to regulate certain speech, applied in this case, when the speech had occurred off campus.
The decision Wednesday said “courts must be more skeptical of a school’s efforts to regulate off-campus speech, for doing so may mean the student cannot engage in that kind of speech at all.”
The ruling also said that a school “will rarely stand in loco parentis” — in the place of the student’s parent — “when a student speaks off campus.”
Supreme Court Justice Thomas dissented in the court’s ruling.
While I agree with the ruling one can hope this young woman has developed more genteel descriptive words.
Why would you want her on your team if she hated it so much??? I agree with her being off the cheerleading team!!
I agree with the court ruling. I disagree with the girl’s actions
If i were the parent, i would have grounded her for the year.
Along with a good bend over my left knee for a good spanking. I’m glad for the decision, but the kids of today are lacking some serious parenting!
Parents are to busy working for the BIG house and 2 luxury cars they more than likely can’t afford.
I want to clarify: not ALL, but MANY!
My daddy would have beat my ass
what does this mean for colleges?
Once again a disappointment in scotus. This is Hate speech, and you just told everyone it’s okay.
Slippery slope! Hate speech is in the eye (or ear) of the beholder and once you allow a court to prohibit some speech it will quickly escalate until all ‘offending’ speech is disallowed. In today’s contentious and biased culture, ‘I love Jesus’, will quickly be banned as hate speech. Free speech does not guarantee you will never be offended. Since when is being offended a federal crime? Get over it and move on. Was her speech ugly? Yes. Was it embarrassing and awful? You bet. Let her parents deal with it, not the courts.
I had to endure the constant incantations of a retired military government civilian (USAF) who worked in an office adjacent to ours, who ‘accused’ me of being gay! (This because, unlike him, I didn’t marry the first 300 pound butt-ugly heifer who would spread her legs in the back of my pickup. A lot of those Lifer’s wives were so ugly, they would make a train take a dirt road) He relished the fact that he had someone to berate in this manner, and he had his nose buried so far up our colonel’s butt crack, they needed the Jaws of Life to separate them. I did eventually get married, though I enjoyed being single, and dating different women, owning a plane and generally enjoying life as a bachelor. The one thing I didn’t understand is why such ‘Hate Speech’ was tolerated in a government office environment….
These kids have grown up hearing such terms in movies, songs, and from other sources. I’m afraid the “F-Bomb” has become commonplace in many cultural environments.
I dont care for her language, but free speech is just that Free!
I’m afraid ‘algorithms’ have effectively limited ‘free speech’ to ‘acceptable speech’. One cannot step on certain toes these days because our government is in the business of protecting minorities, women, Jews, illegal aliens and weirdos from getting their feelings hurt (Of course, if any person among those cited adopts a conservative ideology, those protections are removed..) Our government does not have the authority to address citizens according to their race/gender/sexual orientation/citizenship status, because they’re not elected under our Constitution to favor these groups. However, demagogues and liberals have successfully rallied Americans–with the able assistance of the media–to petition our leaders to be ombudsmen for advancing their ’cause’ of ‘equality’. This is purely a Socialist ruse, and if we continue to allow our administrations to bolster their speech codes and other means to expand their authority, we’ll be regimented and monitored closely to conform to the dictates of tyrants.