Complaining About a T-Shirt Will Not Save the Country

When it comes to Supreme Court cases, there’s a tendency among conservative Christians to make a mountain out of a molehill. But most of the time, a molehill is just a molehill, and it’s important to treat it as such. 

One such mountain-seeming molehill is a new case being petitioned before the U.S. Supreme Court that concerns a middle schooler’s right to wear a t-shirt saying “There are only two genders.” Apparently, this student attended a school that allowed students to wear clothes advocating gay pride, but the school’s administrators forced him to change out of his shirt. 

This incident resulted in the students’ family lawyering up and suing the school, which lawyered up in turn and defended their position in court. The student’s family lost their case, so they are appealing the decision, arguing that the school violated their child’s right to free speech. As the family’s lawyers from Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) declared, “Students don’t lose their free speech rights the moment they walk into a school building.”

Speaking as an educator of some years, I find this whole story to be utterly ridiculous and easily resolvable: don’t punish the student, and tighten up the dress code. Instead, thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of legal work will now be devoted to fighting this supposed injustice. What’s next? An elementary school student picks his nose and the school insensitively reprimands him? I find this whole story to be utterly ridiculous and easily resolvable: don’t punish the student, and tighten up the dress code.Tweet This

Of course, it’s easy enough to see why this case is receiving more attention than it deserves. It is stuffed with Christian conservative catnip issues like transgenderism, free speech, and public schools being dumb. As the framing predictably goes, a plucky youngster is fighting a corrupt government school system on the great issue of our time. 

And yet, it seems altogether unlikely that this case would answer any of the big constitutional questions even if the court decides to rule on it. In all likelihood, some pedantic squish like Justice John Roberts or Amy Coney Barrett would write a tedious majority opinion deciding the issue in the narrowest possible terms: “In this one case, and this one case only, the school, and only this school, should have let this student, and only this student, wear the shirt, and only that shirt, on this one day only.”

As for the major issues in question, little to nothing would change—which ironically might be for the best. The transgenderism craze would continue retreating to the margins of society. Pertinent free speech controversies will still mainly concern censorship and propaganda in digital media. And public schools will slowly but surely keep losing their monopoly through the widespread implementation of school choice policies. 

Not only should this reality prompt conservatives to reconsider how they use the courts but also how they hope to reform society. As can be seen with so many recent decisions—on abortion, affirmative action, school prayer, etc.—most institutions usually carry on as before, simply changing their language or hiding their activities. A nominally conservative majority in the courts will never be the lynchpin of advancing conservative priorities. 

Nor should it be. Although it’s become an overused cliche, Andrew Breitbart’s line that “politics flows downstream from culture” rings true for resolving today’s major issues. On the transgender and DEI issues, Matt Walsh’s documentaries What Is a Woman? and Am I Racist? have been far more effective at changing opinion and official policy than anything decided in a court, voted for in Congress, or mentioned in an executive order. 

This is because—despite the leftist’s belief in the state, the technocrat’s belief in experts, the capitalist’s belief in commerce, or the conservative’s belief in common sense and tradition—the great majority of decisions are made at the local level by the individual. This means that a middle school principal tasked with dealing with an annoying conservative kid wearing a provocative t-shirt will usually employ the conventional wisdom and move on without a second thought.

Instead of challenging the school district in court, the parents could have complained to the school and raised a fuss online if they felt like they were unfairly treated. Moreover, they could always pull their child out of the school if they truly worried about their child being indoctrinated. They could have even taken their complaints to the next school board meeting and felt relatively confident that the FBI wouldn’t come after them.

All of these options would have been much more effective and cheaper in both the short-term and long-term than using what amounts to conservative lawfare. And they wouldn’t even have to risk their legal appeal being rejected—which is likely since the Supreme Court already has dozens of nationwide injunctions to review.

And if the appeal is rejected and this was all for nothing, this family can at least take comfort in the fact that their clueless leftist administrators will eventually have to change course on their dress-code policies—not because of the hassle of fighting this issue in court but because the gender craze has simply become unpopular and lame. As for their child at the center of this fiasco, he can get back to acting his age, asking out girls, hanging out with friends, and playing video games. 

In the end, this is the outcome that conservatives should be fighting for. It may be unbearably normal, but for the last decade, we have found out the hard way that normalcy should never be taken for granted. We have enough mountains to climb; we could use a few more molehills at this point.

[Photo Credit: Alliance Defending Freedom]