Anti-Bush T-Shirt OK to Wear to School

A Vermont middle school was wrong to force a student to cover up part of an anti-drug and anti-Bush message on a T-shirt he wore to school because such action interfered with his First Amendment rights to engage in political speech.

The front of the T-shirt had the words “George W. Bush, Chicken-Hawk-In-Chief” with a picture of the President’s face wearing a helmet superimposed on the body of a chicken. To one side of the President were three lines of cocaine and a razor blade. On the other side, the President is holding a martini glass with an olive in it. The back of the shirt were the words “Crook,” “Cocaine Addict,” “AWOL, Draft Dodger” and “Lying Drunk Driver.”The Court found “[w]ithout question Guiles’s T-shirt uses harsh rhetoric and imagery to express disagreement with the President’s policies and to impugn his character.”

The student wore the T-shirt at least once a week for two months to the school without any complaint. It was not until a field trip when a parent-chaperone raised the issue that the student was asked to turn the shirt inside out, change shirts or tape over the images of the drugs and alcohol and the word “cocaine.” The student went home without going on the field trip. When he returned to school later, he refused to tape over the words and was disciplined and sent home. On the next day he returned to school with the words covered by duct tape with the word “censored.”

The student filed a lawsuit seeking to enjoin the school from preventing him from wearing the T-shirt. After a three day trial, the court denied the injunction but ordered the school to remove the disciplinary action from the student’s record.

The appellate court noted that schools can censor student speech that it lewd, vulgar, indecent or plainly offensive. “We thus ask whether the images of a martini glass, a bottle and glass, a man drinking from a bottle, and lines of cocaine constitute lewd, vulgar, indecent, or plainly offensive speech,” the court wrote. “We think it is clear that these depictions on their own are not lewd, vulgar, or indecent. Lewdness, vulgarity, and indecency normally connote sexual innuendos or profanity.”

As to whether the message was plainly offensive, the court found it was not “especially when considering that they are part of an anti-drug political message.” Finally the court said the T-shirt did not cause any disruption or confrontation in the school. As a result, the trial court erred in not granting the injunction.

Guiles v. Martineau et al., Second District No. 05-0327 and 05-0517, August 31, 2006.