WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – A pro-life student and group from Indiana is appealing to the nation’s highest court after a lower court ruled that Noblesville High School (NHS) could ban pro-life club advertisements from being displayed on school walls.
As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, the 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.”
The student who was denied permission to put up the flyers, identified only as ED, already had her club approved by the school and had recruited more than 30 members. The school not only forbade the display of these flyers but suspended her club after she and her mother continued to appeal the decision, which the principal deemed an “attempt at insubordination led by an outside adult advocating with the student.”
She was later allowed to reapply and the club’s status was restored, but ED and her parents sued, arguing both the censure and suspension were motivated by “hostility to her pro-life views, in violation of the First Amendment and the Equal Access Act.”
Last August, however, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the student, saying that NHS was within its rights to reject the fliers, as they contained non-neutral “political” content with a potential for “disruption” and could “reasonably be perceived as bearing the school’s imprimatur.”
On January 28, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) announced that it is appealing the case to the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of ED and Noblesville Students for Life.
ADF notes that “no written policy governed” the content of flyers that NHS’s “more than 70 noncurricular clubs” are permitted to hang in school common areas. This, the petition argues, constitutes “impermissible viewpoint discrimination.”
“Students don’t lose their constitutionally protected freedom of speech when they walk into a school building. A school can’t tell a high-school student or student organization that they can’t publicly express pro-life messages that are important to them,” ADF Senior Counsel and Vice President of Appellate Advocacy John Bursch says. “While other student groups at the school were free to express their messages, the school censored this club’s flyers and then revoked the club’s recognition because the messages on the flyers were too overtly pro-life.”
The current Supreme Court is often unpredictable on conservative and pro-family goals, despite six of its nine current members having been appointed by the GOP, including three by President Donald Trump alone.
The Court has delivered conservatives major victories on gun rights, environmental regulation, affirmative action, and, most significantly, abortion with the overturn of Roe v. Wade, but it has also issued dismissive rulings on COVID-19 shot mandates, religious freedom, and LGBT ideology to the point that conservative Justice Samuel Alito has taken the rare step of criticizing Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh for lacking the “fortitude” to resolve such issues.
