NOBLESVILLE, Indiana (LifeSiteNews) — The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit recently ruled that a public high school can bar a student group from putting up pro-life posters in hallways.
The appeals court decided on Thursday that Noblesville High School in Indiana acted within its rights when it denied a student permission to display in school hallways flyers advertising her pro-life club. This is because, according to Circuit Judge Nancy Maldonado, the posters contained non-neutral “political” content with a potential for “disruption.”
The proposed flyers in question, created by Students for Life of America (SFLA), had the headline, “Pro-Life Students, It’s Time to Meet Up!” and images of young demonstrators holding signs reading “Defund Planned Parenthood” and “I Am the Pro-Life Generation.”
Veteran pro-life activist Will Goodman denounced the court decision in a statement to LifeSiteNews as “an absurd violation of the First Amendment which must be immediately appealed.”
“The sick irony of this court deciding that a student’s pro-life message respecting human life is ‘non-neutral political content’ is that the court itself does so in an unconstitutional opinion which is itself in essence ‘non-neutral political content,’” said Goodman.
The student who was denied permission to put up these flyers, named in the court decision only as E.D., had already had her pro-life club approved by the school and had recruited more than 30 members. The school not only forbid the display of these flyers, it suspended her club after she met with a school official together with her mother to continue to petition for her freedom to put up the posters.
The principal of the school decided to suspend the club because he saw E.D.’s “effort to revisit the flyer issue” after having already received instructions from other school officials as “an “attempt at insubordination led by an outside adult advocating with the student.” This was despite the fact that, by his own admission, the principal allowed this petition meeting with a school official to proceed “because E.D. had done the talking.”
The principal allowed the student to reapply for approval of her pro-life club a few months later and granted it full status once again.
Following these events, E.D. sued the school district through her parents, Michael and Lisa Duell, alleging that the censure of her flyers and her club’s suspension were motivated by “hostility to her pro-life views, in violation of the First Amendment and the Equal Access Act.”
However, the seventh circuit declared that the First Amendment does not protect E.D.’s freedom to put up posters with pro-life messaging, since they are not considered “private speech” and they can be “reasonably be perceived as bearing the school’s imprimatur.” The court considered the flyers’ message “Defund Planned Parenthood” to be a “polarizing political slogan” with a potential for “disruption” in the school that would “divert attention from the business of learning.”
Thus, the ban on the pro-life flyers was aligned with the school’s “pedagogical duty to create a stable, neutral educational environment,” wrote Maldonado.
The judge noted the Duells’ argument that the school’s rejection of E.D.’s flyers “amount[ed] to impermissible viewpoint discrimination” and admitted that courts are “divided” over whether precedent “requires viewpoint neutrality in school-sponsored speech.
Maldonado furthermore admitted that Noblesville High School had previously had a flyer posted by the Black Student Union featuring an image of three raised fists, which are associated with the “Black Power” and Black Lives Matter movements. She dismissed its relevance to the matter, however, since there was no proof that it was approved by the school.
Goodman further chided the judges in this case for “exercising raw prejudice against those young people who would be voices for the voiceless, thus silencing their freedom of speech while also silencing the cries of the preborn babies.”
“God bless these prolife students for their courage in standing up for their brothers and sisters in the womb who are suffering deadly persecution every day,” he continued. “May the Lord grant them protection, guidance, and authentic justice.”
