A teenager is threatening to sue his high school principal over the claim that he was banned from hanging pro-life posters, charging that his First Amendment rights have been restricted.
Patrick Edwards, 18, a student at Ryle High School in Union Kentucky, has appealed to attorneys for assistance over the claim that Principal Matthew Turner censored his “Students for Life” club by reportedly not allowing the display of six posters, WXIX-TV reported.
“We want to hang up fliers that promote a pro-life message and that would attract students to our club,” Edwards told the outlet. “It’s hard to get your pro-life message out there when you’re restricted from putting it anywhere.”
It will be interesting to see which other groups were able to post their messages, if any. Some lawyer is billing away right now researching the issue on behalf of the district. At least he’s having fun, and making money.
This is one the worst problems in America today. “Justice” can only be attained by paying money to a lawyer regardless of how unconstitutional, immoral or stupid a given situation is. A school principle determines whether a poster can be hung based on his own prejudices and the only accepted recourse in our society is to sue.
This is how our government has designed its tyranny. It makes laws and take actions it knows are blatantly unconstitutional and an individual or the public at large can only hope to correct the injustice by spending more gobs of money on lawyers than the government that pays its own corrupt lawyers and judges (yes, I know that’s redundant) with virtually unlimited money that was already stolen from the aggrieved parties.
Justice has become too expensive for the average person to afford anymore no matter how morally right they may be or how morally wrong the injustice they are fighting is.
I think the kid’s idea is that this is so egregious that some local or national attorney will take it pro bono.
Heck, if the kid juster enters the school rule-book as evidence along with a few pictures of other groups’s ads he doesn’t even need a lawyer. But judging from the press this already received, the principal would be stupid not to back down because there are probably lawyers chomping at the publicity bit.
I suspect you are correct Meerkat. One such group is FIRE.
https://www.thefire.org/
My comment was more of a general nature, but even in cases where a legal aid group intervenes there are court costs and the lawyers are paid through donations mostly. Plus, judges often ignore the law and constitution and multiple appeals can be required to address even simple issues that used to be done at the level of a personal agreement between responsible adults without the tentacles of government being involved.
Bubba,
Yes I am familiar the FIRE through Mike Adams. But you are correct in general in how do you fight unknown issues like this on your own without going broke? Which is a major breakdown in our constitutional system.
I hope he wins big, it will set good precedent
There remains a need for a duel today, piss somebody off, be prepared to met the consequences or STFU.
I’m betting a lot of pecksniffians would do the latter.
High school kids have no first amendment rights. Nor do they own the venue of the school property to express their first amendment rights. In many states, they don’t even have the right to refuse to go to school. Just another example of entitlement mentality.
if the school gets sued, who pays? Not the principal. Not the school administrators. The taxpayers. Lawyers are always happy to sue the taxpayers.