After initially banning the wearing of rubber bracelets that say "I (heart) boobies," Medomak High School announced this week that the bracelets would be allowed. In addition, the school agreed to lift the suspensions of any students who were suspended for wearing the bracelets, and to erase any suspensions from the disciplinary records of students who had already been punished. The bracelets are a fundraising tool, with the proceeds going to breast cancer research. A number of the students who were suspended from school had family members with breast cancer, and they regarded the bracelets as a form of support (both fiscal and emotional) for the search for a cure.
As the Supreme Court noted in Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), students do not "shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." In that case, students wanted to demonstrate opposition to the war in Vietnam by wearing black armbands. The school argued that it feared a disturbance if the students were allowed to engage on such provocative expression on school grounds, but the Supreme Court said that fear could not justify censorship. Now, more than 40 years later, students still face the threat of punishment for engaging in protected expression. Those students, by their activism, learned an important lesson about the Constitution this week (also from Tinker): "Under our Constitution, free speech is not a right that is given only to be so circumscribed that it exists in principle but not in fact."
