Last month, two Minnesota high school girls saw Eve Ensler's play, The Vagina Monologues. So impressed were they by Ensler's work that they purchased a couple of "I (heart) My Vagina" buttons and began wearing them to school. The trouble began when the school principal, Nancy Wondrasch, decided that the buttons were inappropriate and admonished the girls for wearing them to school. "We support free speech," she told the press. "But when it does infringe on other people's rights and our school policies, then we need to take a look at that." Wondrasch may not understand the First Amendment, but the ACLU does: It has offered to help the girls if the school attempts to punish them for wearing the buttons. A number of the girls' fellow students get it, too: More than one hundred of them have ordered his and hers t-shirts bearing the respective slogans "I Support Your Vagina" and "I (heart) My Vagina." Principal Wondrasch has threatened to expel both girls if anyone shows up at the school wearing one of the shirts.

One has to wonder what the response from the two girls would be if boys in their class starting wearing I (heart) My Penis buttons. Past experience does not lead me to believe they would embrace the free speech rights of the boys, but I could be wrong.

Maybe I'm still a snickering teenager deep down (yes, probably deep down there), but I can't get past the "I support your vagina" slogan. Thanks, but mine hasn't fallen yet.

Or maybe I'd wear a "Get back to me when you can support your own ass" button.

I still remember the opening scene in Neuromancer where the girls in the subway are wearing pictures of their vaginas on plastic bracelets, I think it was. Any day now...

I literally detest the uniform policy at my daughter's school, but this is the kind of thing that makes school districts embrace uniforms.

"I can't get past the 'I support your vagina' slogan. Thanks, but mine hasn't fallen yet."

Yeah, I was thinking, how can you support something that ... well, never mind.

I've always thought of myself as pretty absolutist about the first amendment, and God knows I think the majority of school administrators are tin pot Napoleons. Yet in this case I'm not sure I agree that the principal "doesn't understand" the first amendment. There's a sexual undertone to all this that I think may rightly be regulated as disruptive to a school atmosphere. We're talking about high school, after all, not college, and the kids are 15-18 years old.

What should one think, for example, about t-shirt worn by a male bearing a picture of a screw followed by "your vagina"? Does the first amendment forbid administrators from prohibiting a teenage male going to high school wearing a t-shirt saying "I (screw) your vagina"? I have my doubts.

The ACLU may choose to follow the South Park paradigm but there certainly have been historical restrictions on inappropriate speech within the academic setting particularly with respect to minors. The only way I think the ACLU gets a feather in its cap here is if it pro forma cows the school into submission with mere threats.

Principal Wondrasch has threatened to expel both girls if anyone shows up at the school wearing one of the shirts.

Oy, sorry for the unreadable mess. Don't the comments support _any_ html tags at all? Not even italics? Gack...

I do have a pleasant recollection of wearing, in the mid-80's, t-shirts with the slogan, "If you can't be an athlete, be an athletic supporter" and thinking I was being very sly and naughty. Clearly, times have changed.

Finally, and here's a point more relevant to your post, Erin, don't school children have significantly narrower free speech rights? Can't high schools restrict the right to free expression? Don't they, for instance, routinely censor school news papers?

I count myself as a first amendment absolutist, but I fail to see where that applies in this case. Schools have the obligation to maintain an orderly environment, and prohibiting buttons with vulgar expressions on them ("bathroom talk") is well within the bounds of what's permissible under the Constitution.

Where is the ACLU when you need them? Why aren't they defending that professor at Loyola in Chicago who was fired for getting into a political argument outside of class with some radical Moslem students?

Would the ACLU support the rights of students to wear buttons saying "F*** Homos"? or "Sodomy Should Be A Crime"? or "I (heart) P***y"? Of course not. What's the difference?

If these shirts were to be allowed, some smart-ass kids (like the high school vintage me) would come up with some deliberately provocative variations to push the envelope further. It would eventually lead to fights, if not the dreaded "hostile learning environment".

RP: I believe schools censor school newspapers all the time. Of course, that's also because they're *running* the paper, for educational purposes. It's a school publication, so the school can censor it as it sees fit, as I understand it - but IANAL. (Who owns the press, has the freedom, in other words.)

As I understand it, as long as the school is the publisher, it is under no obligation to print anything it doesn't approve of, which seems perfectly correct and fair.

If the students had their own paper on their own dime, I don't think it could be censored.

"If the students had their own paper on their own dime, I don't think it could be censored."

Sure it could be, if it were circulated on campus and proved to interfere with the learning environment (such that it may already be), the administration maintains the right to restrict its access on campus. It is under this same privilege the school has restricted inappropriate clothing and other property. Now this doesn't obviously prevent parents, legislators, the ACLU, the ACLJ or other groups from challenging the school's standards, but it is certainly agreed that the schools maintain some significant right to restrict impertinent and distracting "speech" within the confines of their little realm.

I heart my duodendum? I support your ascending sigmoid colon? Hmmn.

I am not sure what I think, other than this is a complex issue. Frank talk about sexuality is better than the head-in-the-sand "abstinence only" teachings that are mandated. As the parent of a high school child, though, I druther that printed, wearable items referring to the human reproductive system be avoided at school...

Hmmmn. Would the school forbid printed reproductions of Georgia O'Keefe's flower pictures (surely some are quite...vulvular.).

P.S.: Technically, the girls (and Eve Enshler) are incorrect. They should be discussing the vulva. Vaginas are danged hard to see, without speculums.

I think it is necessary to point out that the First Amendment does not prohibit schools from denying freedom of speech. It prohibits the federal government from denying freedom of speech. This prohibition was applied to state governments by the 14th amendment. Now, public schools are run by the government. If the school was private, the First Amendment would not be a problem at all. This is just one of the many issues that arises when the federal government takes control of education, which the Constitution does not give it power to do.

LOL Liz - I enjoyed your wit. I think you meant "duodenum", but really the problem with the shirts is not their failure to be accurate, but rather appropriate. There is a time for discussing sex and I would imagine that by that age most students are aware what each gender possesses, so they are hardly educational. The fact that they love them is entirely too personal and certainly among the hormone-ravaged, distractingly provocative. What it have been better for them to wear "I drove my volva to school today"? I doubt it. Although if they had the entire thing in Latin at least it would have some real academic value.

Martin: They could certainly prohibit distribution of such a paper; however they could not censor its content.

KM: The federal government does not run the schools, though. State and local governments do, and there's nothing unconstitutional about that. Even if the 14th Amendment extends 1st Amendment protections to operations of state and local government, it's still not federal operation. Federal funding for schools might well be unconstitutional (in the sense of not being enumerated, not the sense of being contrary to an enumeration or prohibition), but, really has nothing to do with the issue at hand, that I can tell.

ts:

Seems like the reaction would be the same. Punishment from the prinicpal and support from the ACLU.

Sigivald:

As a lay person I may not be privy to the full scope of case law on this matter, however as in Erin's example of a school rightly restricting certain speech on clothing or among a student's possessions but not banning all forms of expression within those media, it would seem fairly safe to expect a school’s right would be recognized to censor the contents of published material brought onto the campus as a condition for its circulation. While I'm sure such censorship would have to meet a fairly strict test of what would be appropriate for the necessity of maintaining order and discipline on the campus and what would not, it seems to me simply a matter of common sense that such rules can and must exist.

I think the vagina shirts would complement my own "I (heart) SLOPPY SECONDS" quite well, don't you think?

I think some of the sugestions here are making me very glad that our high school's unwritten dresscode was "The Preppy Handbook." We were shallow but, damn, we looked *good*.