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 Va School Accused Of Anti-Gay Censorship
by 365Gay.com Newscenter Staff
Posted: December 20, 2007 - 3:00 pm ET
(Portsmouth, Virginia) The American Civil
Liberties Union on Friday demanded that a high school that punished a student
for wearing a t-shirt featuring a lesbian pride symbol apologize to the student
and guarantee that it will no longer illegally censor her in the future.
School officials at I.C. Norcom High School had
threatened the 17-year-old senior with suspension because a teacher was upset by
her t-shirt, which had an image of two overlapping female gender symbols.
“When my teacher told me she wanted me to turn
my shirt inside-out or cover it up, I was confused, because I’ve worn that
shirt to school several times before and nobody ever said a word about it,”
said Bethany Laccone, who attends a different school full-time but goes to
Norcom High every morning for a hotel management class.
“I wear that shirt because I want people to
know that I’m proud of being a lesbian and comfortable with who I am. And I
have the same Constitutional right to free speech as any other student.”
In a letter sent to I.C. Norcom High School
officials this morning, the ACLU demanded that any mention of the censorship be
removed from Laccone’s student record, that the school guarantee it would not
illegally censor Laccone or other students in the future, and that the school
apologize to Laccone for its actions.
“What’s happening to Bethany Laccone is a
clear-cut case of unconstitutional censorship,” said Kent Willis, Executive
Director of the ACLU of Virginia.
“Bethany Laccone has the same rights to express
her opinions and be open about who she is as any other student. We intend to
make sure I.C. Norcom High School stops breaking the law and treats all of its
students equally regardless of their views.”
Laccone says that on December 10 she was pulled
out of class by a teacher who said she shouldn’t be wearing the shirt at
school and then sent her to the assistant principal’s office. The assistant
principal and the teacher then told Laccone that the shirt violated a section of
the school dress code that bans “bawdy, salacious or sexually suggestive
messages.”
In a later meeting with Laccone’s father, the
assistant principal said that he was upholding the censorship, and added that
because the teacher is “very conservative” she claimed she was so upset by
the t-shirt that it “interfered with her ability to teach.”
“A public school teacher’s job is to serve
the needs of all the students who go to that school,” said Christine Sun, a
staff attorney with the ACLU’s national Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender
Project.
“If a teacher can’t deal with the fact that
there are gay students in her classroom, that doesn’t mean she gets to violate
that student’s First Amendment rights.”
In 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the
landmark ACLU case Tinker v. Des Moines that students have a Constitutional
right to free speech. As Justice Abe Fortas wrote, “Schools may not be
enclaves of totalitarianism. Students and teachers do not shed their
constitutional rights to freedom of expression at the schoolhouse gates.” In
addition to being a symbol of lesbian pride, the symbols on Laccone’s shirt
are also commonly used in chemistry, astronomy, and astrology and are believed
by some scholars to date back as far as ancient Roman times.
©365Gay.com 2007
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