Court says Naperville students can wear anti-gay T-shirts

In a case involving a Naperville high school, the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled March 1 that school districts can't prohibit students from wearing shirts with anti-gay messages.

"A school that permits advocacy of the rights of homosexual students cannot be allowed to stifle criticism of homosexuality," Judge Richard Posner wrote for a three-judge panel.

The case involved a lawsuit filed by Heidi Zamecnik and Alexander Nuxoll, students at Neuqua Valley High School, in 2006. That April, a day after the annual Day of Silence, an event sponsored by an LGBT student group to promote acceptance of and fight bullying against LGBTs, Zamecnik wore a T-shirt that read, "Be Happy, Not Gay" on the back and "My Day of Silence, Straight Alliance," on the front.

School officials, after receiving complaints, forced her to alter the shirt to read, "Be Happy," saying the words "Not Gay" violated school rules prohibiting derogatory comments that refer to race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation or disability.

Filing suit against the Indian Prairie School District, Zamecnik and Nuxoll claimed that allowing other students to wear shirts that read, "Be happy who you are," while prohibiting them from expressing their own anti-gay sentiments violated their rights.

The appeals court agreed, upholding an April 2010 district court ruling that awarded Zamecnik and Nuxoll $25 each in damages. Posner wrote that "people in our society do not have a legal right to prevent criticism of their beliefs or even their way of life."

"A city can protect an unpopular speaker from the violence of an angry audience by deploying police, but that is hardly an apt response to students enraged by a T-shirt," Posner wrote. "A school has legitimate responsibilities, albeit paternalistic in character, toward the immature captive audience that consists of its students, including the responsibility of protecting them from being seriously distracted from their studies by offensive speech during school hours. But the anger engendered by Zamecnik's wearing a T-shirt that said "Be Happy, Not Gay" did not give rise to substantial disruption."