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N.C. School nixes gay student's campaign posters
By Scott Dodd, Knight Ridder from MyrtleBeachOnline.com April 27, 2004
Jarred Gamwell wants to be student council president at James Hunt High in Wilson, N.C.
He's got the resume for it. He plays sax in the marching and concert bands. He tutors other students and competes in the Science Olympiad. He has a 4.5 grade point average this year.
He's also gay.
So as part of his campaign, the 17-year-old junior put up posters last week with slogans he thought were catchy: "Queer Eye for Hunt High" and "Gay Guys Know Everything!"
But Principal Bill Williamson found the messages "disruptive of the educational process" and irrelevant to the campaign for student president.
So the principal ordered the posters taken down. A school attorney said Monday that Williamson has the right to limit school-sponsored speech.
Now, with the election just a day away, Gamwell has enlisted the national American Civil Liberties Union and is prepared to sue to get his message out.
"I've stood up for things like this in the past, and I've taken the kind of abuse that gay people have to take," Gamwell said.
The ACLU said that although they've confronted schools for censoring gay messages in the past, this is the first dispute they've seen over campaign slogans with a gay theme.
"The Supreme Court has long held that high-school students - including gay students - are protected by the Constitution," ACLU attorney Leslie Cooper wrote in a letter to Williamson on Monday.
Schools are allowed to regulate student speech and behavior, of course. What's different in this case, the ACLU says, is that the school set up a public forum for political messages - namely, the posters - then decided some viewpoints are OK and others aren't.
"There's no obscenity. I'm at a loss to understand how it's disruptive," said James Esseks, litigation director for the ACLU's lesbian and gay rights program. "It's an election. Elections are about people being able to send political messages, even if other people don't like them."
Williamson declined to comment Monday, but the Wilson County School District's attorney, David Orcutt, defended the principal's actions.
"It's not as if we took every poster he had down," Orcutt said. "We took two posters down. We thought the language was inappropriate."
Orcutt said the school also removed the posters because they referred to a specific group of people. "If some other student had put up a poster that said, 'Whites know everything,' we would have removed that, as well," he said.
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