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Family prepares to sue school that prohibited 12-year-old from wearing ‘two genders’ shirt – LifeSite

MIDDLEBOROUGH, Massachusetts (LifeSiteNews) — The family of a 12-year-old boy is preparing to sue his Massachusetts public school for violating his First Amendment rights by forbidding him from wearing a shirt that says “There are only two genders.”

Seventh-grader Liam Morrison recounted during an April 13 school committee meeting how two Nichols Middle School staff members removed him from gym class to tell him he needed to change his shirt in order to be allowed back in class.

“I was told that people were complaining about the words on my shirt, that my shirt was making some students feel unsafe. Yes, words on a shirt made people feel unsafe. They told me that I wasn’t in trouble, but it sure felt like I was,” he explained.

When he refused to change his shirt, the school called his father to have him take him home from school.

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There are countless reasons to conclude modern sex-education is less about critical thinking and more about indoctrinating and sexualizing children at as young an age as possible.

Consider these 3 questions: 

  • Why are politicians around the world pushing radical transgender theories on children as young as 5? 
  • Why is the World Health Organization calling for 4 year-olds to be taught how to masturbate?
  • Why are children in schools being shown graphic images of sex and told anything goes so long as consent is established, if not to encourage our sons and daughters to become sexually active? 

A sane society would try to shield impressionable children from becoming sexualized, and encourage them not to watch pornography, take puberty blockers or mutilate their genitalia, but our schools increasingly promote these behaviors.

In reality, the media, most politicians, and many education chiefs are obliterating a parent’s ability to protect their child’s innocence and identity. 

We must realize: these elites want children to have THEIR values, not YOURS. SIGN THE PLEDGE!

The results of this explicit, inappropriate sex-saturated culture and education have been startling: there have never been more children claiming to be transgender, gay, lesbian and bisexual, nor have we ever seen such high levels of sexual assaults by minors.

Countless politicians, media personalities and education chiefs are too busy promoting woke trends to realize that sexualizing minors amounts to grooming, and has devastating consequences in many cases.

Children whose inhibitions are broken down risk addiction to pornography, teenage pregnancy, STDs, gender dysphoria, online shaming, and a whole host of other negative outcomes. 

Parents, not the government, must be in control of what their child is taught about sex.

Just listen to the type of materials public schools in the U.S. are promoting: 

That’s why we are asking you to sign the Parents’ Pledge that you will pull your children out of sex-education classes if your school chooses to sexualize your child.

The Parents’ Pledge is our best chance of winning back our children’s schools before they’re entirely lost to radical sex-obsessed teachers’ unions who are foisting these curricula on teachers.

Do you really want other adults deciding what your child is exposed to? Of course not.

Please share this brand new grassroots Parents’ Pledge with like-minded parents and join a growing movement of mothers and fathers who are wise to the threat of their child being led into sexual activity.

MORE INFORMATION: 

Most teachers are disturbed by their unions’ push to sexualize children

Planned Parenthood tells middle-schoolers about avoiding parental consent for abortion and contraception

The corrupting influence of sex-education is causing widespread abuse among school children 

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The Washington Stand columnist Joshua Arnold has remarked that Morrison was sent home from school for “what might be the silliest reason [ever]: wearing a shirt conveying factually accurate information.”

According to The Daily Wire, Middleborough Public Schools superintendent Carolyn Lyons said in an email that Liam violated the school dress code because the “content of Liam’s shirt targeted students of a protected class; namely in the area of gender identity.”

Liam objected during the school committee meeting that his t-shirt said “Nothing harmful, nothing threatening. Just a statement I believe to be a fact. I have been told that my shirt was targeting a protected class. Who is this protected class? Are their feelings more important than my rights?”

School staff members have also told him to remove a shirt that read, “There are censored genders.”

The middle school’s lawyers told the family’s Massachusetts Family Institute (MFI) attorneys that the school would continue to “prohibit the wearing of a T-shirt by Liam Morrison or anyone else which is likely to be considered discriminatory, harassing and/or bullying to others including those who are gender nonconforming by suggesting that their sexual orientation, gender identity or expression does not exist or is invalid.”

MFI attorney Sam Whiting firmly believes Liam’s shirt is protected by the First Amendment, and that his behavior was entirely appropriate under the circumstances.

Whiting told Fox News Digital that Nichols Middle School censored Liam because of his “political and cultural viewpoint” on an issue that is being widely “debat[ed] right now in the public square.”

“Liam did everything correct in this situation. He hasn’t disrupted anything. He hasn’t harassed anyone. And yet they’re still censoring him just because they don’t like what his shirt had to say. And that’s made even more obvious by the fact that they made him take off a censored version of the shirt,” Whiting continued.

Whiting is confident that the Morrison family will emerge victorious.

“We believe that we’re going to get a win on this. I mean, I really can’t think of a better fact pattern to vindicate a student’s First Amendment rights,” he said.

The family’s attorney said Nichols Middle School can next expect a summons to federal court.

Liam said during his speech before the school committee meeting that he was never once confronted by any student or staff member who told him “they were bothered by what I was wearing.” Instead, “several kids told me that they supported my actions and that they wanted one, too,” he said.

Judge Andrew Napolitano has pointed out that while “students, even at age 11, have First Amendment rights,” “they are subject to the mission of the school,” meaning that if the speech “disrupts” education, “then the school can punish the student.”

“But if the student is silent expressing an opinion and there is no evidence of disruption, then the student’s opinion stands,” Napolitano said.

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