In a 2-1 decision, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said that a T-shirt that proclaimed "Be Ashamed, Our School Embraced What God Has Condemned'' on the front and "Homosexuality Is Shameful'' on the back was "injurious to gay and lesbian students and interfered with their right to learn.'' The court said that the shirt can be barred on a public high school campus without violating the 1st Amendment. --Los Angeles Times
The two-judge majority criticized (dissenting Judge) Kozinski, suggesting that the majority could rely upon the motion pictures Brokeback Mountain or The Matthew Shepard Story as evidence of the harmful effects of anti-gay harassment.... The majority implied that Brokeback Mountain is in, and the Bible is out. What's really broken here is the majority's approach to the First Amendment. --Alliance Defense League Senior Legal Counsel Kevin Theriot.
Tyler Harper is the name of the bigoted little bastard who actually wore the t-shirt and then sued the school district for trying to "change his religious views." But it's hard to get worked up about Tyler. He's just another piece of white trash, blowing along the gutters of route 15, on the outskirts of the crystal meth and crystal cathedral capital of San Diego. His parents, of course, are instigators and accessories in this little hate-fest, clogging our courtrooms, and possibly en route to the newly renovated Supreme Court. But are the backwards Harpers and their moronic t-shirt campaign really the brainchildren behind a legal strategy designed to strip gays of "special protections" under the law? Who's backing them? And why the 9th circuit as a testing ground?
Enter The Alliance Defense Fund, a tax-free "charity" legal organization founded by extreme members of the Christian right, including televangelists. The ADF describes itself as "a legal alliance defending the right to hear and speak the Truth through strategy, training, funding, and litigation." On October 11, 2005, Bill O'Reilly spoke with a caller who asked "[h]ow do people like me ... fight people like" the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). O'Reilly replied: "Well, you fight them by giving money to the Alliance Defense Fund [ADF] out in Phoenix, Arizona. Alliance Defense Fund is set up to be the anecdote [sic] to the ACLU. They come in and fight them in court."
The president of the ADF? Alan Sears, author of The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today (Broadman & Holman, 2003). In The Homosexual Agenda, Sears writes:
Unfortunately, if many homosexual activists have their way, Christ's message of redemptive love will be silenced and those who share it through the preaching of the uncensored words of Scripture will be punished. ...The effort of homosexual activists to convince Americans to tolerate (i.e., "affirm") homosexual behavior tramples religious freedom and leaves a trail of broken bodies in the dust.
Touching prose, to be sure, but we don't need to travel further than Cheney's Wyoming to see who holds the rap sheet in the broken bodies category. More interestingly, Sears formerly worked at the Justice Department, under Ed Meese. And who was the one dissenting judge in this t-shirt case? Coincidentally, a fellow Reagan appointee, Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski. You may remember him as the winner on an episode of the Dating Game years ago. Or the guy who got mandatory bail for traffic tickets overturned in L.A. when he, and later his son, fought their citations. Now he's one of three judges deciding if your child has to endure open hostility and bullying at school.
Here's what he said in vigorous support of future lacrosse-team rapist Tyler Harper: "I have considerable difficulty with giving school authorities the power to decide that only one side of a controversial topic may be discussed in the school environment because the opposing point of view is too extreme or demeaning.... The fundamental problem with the majority's approach is that it has no anchor anywhere in the record or in the law."
Oh, really, Judge Kozinski? What about cross burning? Didn't the supreme court just a few years ago deem it to be not constitutionally protected speech? In fact, when asked that same question at a 2003 Town hall meeting, Kozinski replied:
"I must tell you. It's a difficult legal question....I'm hoping that this will be the cross-burning case and that it will be limited in its effect to cross-burning, which is viewed as particularly offensive, particularly a practice that raises hatred and leads to racial strife. But sometimes the Supreme Court decides cases and they're never heard from again. I'm hoping this is one of them."
So you'd kind of like to just forget that decision, is that it, Your Honor? Or is your belief that cross-burning is "particularly offensive" but gay-bashing is not, because based on your career of cronyism and record of political contributions, you just don't actually know people who would be offended by the latter. And what about, in your words, "a practice that raises hatred and leads to strife?" Do you even bother yourself with the inconvenient reality of gay teen suicide rates? Or drop-out rates? Or Matthew Shephard? Consequences of bullying? What about the causes of massacres like Columbine? Better yet, take a look at www.GodHatesFags.com and checkout their upcoming events.
You, Judge Kozinski, are the son of Romanian Holocaust survivors. I wonder what t-shirt would have stopped you in your tracks at John Marshall High School? What would have caused you to transfer far from where your dad ran his humble Los Feliz grocery store? You had a chance to succeed as a minority in this country because of the grace and wisdom of jurists who came before you. They knew there were limits to first amendment rights when it came to elementary and high schools, where children are compelled to be present. And I believe, in your heart, unseen by the people to whom you owe your politically appointed career, you know better, Alex Kozinski. So shame on you, Judge. Shame on you.
There is much more than a t-shirt at stake here. This is the beginning of a legal strategy at work to legalize discrimination. It is a strategy using the First Amendment issue as a smokescreen, a Trojan horse. The victims of the kind of hatred and bigotry Kozinski and the ADF are trying to enable escaped by one vote yesterday-- one. And the ADF plans to appeal.