12-yr-old Massachusetts boy who destroyed school board over ‘two genders’ t-shirt faces legal setback

A First Amendment lawsuit filed on behalf of a 12-year-old Massachusetts boy who was told by his school he couldn’t wear a T-shirt proclaiming, “There are only two genders” hit a snag on Wednesday, when a district court judge ruled that the ban would stay in effect pending a final decision in the case.

As BizPac Review reported, Liam Morrison, a student at Nichols Middle School in Middleborough, Massachusetts, was sent home after he refused to change his truthful shirt.

At an April 13 school committee meeting, the young man dropped the mic on the school board, as he recalled the “uncomfortable talk” two adults made him sit through because of his shirt.

“I never thought that the shirt I wore to school on March 21 would lead me to speak with you today,” he said in a now-viral speech to the committee.

“I was told that people were complaining about the words on my shirt, that my shirt was making some students feel unsafe,” he explained. “Yes — words on a shirt made people feel unsafe. They told me that I wasn’t in trouble, but it sure felt like I was.”

Last month, on Morrison’s behalf, lawyers with Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and Massachusetts Family Institute (MFI) filed a federal lawsuit, Fox News Digital reports.

We were asking for an immediate order so that he could express himself for the rest of the school year,” ADF legal counsel Logan Spena told the outlet. “Liam’s suing for the right to do what every other student in his school currently has the right to do, which is respectfully express their own view on a matter of enormous public concern. What is the relationship between sex and gender?”

As he waited to learn the judge’s decision, Morrison donned a different shirt: “There are CENSORED genders.”

Mary Ellen Siegler of Massachusetts Informed Parents called the clever move, “brave.”

“MA middle school student Liam Morrison is brave,” she stated on Facebook. “God bless him!”

“How do you feel about your district spending thousands of dollars over a futile legal battle to deny a student his constitutional right to free speech?” she asked Middleborough parents. “Couldn’t this money be put to better use to increase the quality of academics taught in the district?”

According to Fox News Digital, Morrison was “almost immediately” instructed to take that shirt off, too. Spena told the outlet that the school has two sets of rules for students with respect to expressing opinions on gender issues.

Pride flags and transgender posters are encouraged ideologies at the school, Spena said, but “it’s banning Liam from expressing his own views respectfully, which is that there are only two genders.”

“The school has other rules on what students can wear that it is allowed to enforce,” he said. “Liam’s not asking to literally wear whatever he wants, but he is asking to do what other students are already allowed to do, which is express their view on this topic in a non-disruptive manner.”

“No matter what you think about the gender issue, it’s pretty remarkable that a school can punish a student for protesting censorship in America today,” he added.

School officials and the town of Middleborough are essentially arguing they do have the right to censor any speech deemed potentially offensive to other students, Spena said.

“They claim that because Liam’s message is not inclusive, they can exclude it,” he explained. “What they don’t account for is how does their own speech and all the other speech they already permit impact Liam? It completely excludes him. But for some reason, that doesn’t seem to count.”

The next hearing is scheduled for June 13. Should the court rule against Morrison, the ADF will appeal the case to a higher court, according to Spena.

 

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