1969’s Tinker v. Des Moines court ruling concerned three Iowa high school students who, in 1965, wore black armbands to protest the Vietnam War. School officials had contrived to shut down the youths’ political speech.

In a historic ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court wrote that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to free speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

New York University’s First Amendment Watch observed on the decision’s 50th anniversary that “school officials could not censor student speech unless it would ‘materially and substantially interfere’ with school operation.”

The Tinker v. Des Moines ruling was a landmark affirmation of students’ expression liberty from government censorship. To this day, free speech champions cite it in their noble advocacy.

But the lesson of Tinker v. Des Moines — that the constitution protects youth disagreement with government policies — has passed from vogue on the left. This is an era in which left-wing fascists, openly hostile to citizen expression that challenges their ideals, exploit authority to crush independent speech — including that of students.

A June 10 Reuters story (“Massachusetts school allowed to ban student’s ‘two genders’ shirt, court rules”) related that the 1st U.S. Circuit Court Of Appeals decided educators at Middleborough’s Nichols Middle School had not violated a seventh-grader’s First Amendment rights in 2023 by compelling him to either remove a T-shirt whose message asserted “There are only two genders” or go home for the day.

Twelve-year-old Liam Morrison chose to go home. He had selected the shirt’s message in protest of officials’ plastering school walls with pro-LGBT propaganda and “Pride Month” celebrations.

But the court’s Democratic-appointed majority was indifferent to First Amendment interests. It found educators had acted appropriately in censoring a message officials argued might demean the chosen identities of classmates and conflict with the “hate speech” provision of the school’s dress code.

Aggrieved student Morrison is represented by Christian attorneys of the Alliance Defending Freedom. Following the unjust verdict, they vowed continued advocacy of Morrison’s speech rights in future actions. They are fighting the Good Fight.

But they are facing off with an ideological foe that prioritizes left-wing authoritarian government far above individuals’ liberties. Remember, during Supreme Court oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri — at issue was the Biden administration covertly pressuring Big Tech overlords to “disappear” stories not to its taste, like the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s “Laptop from Hell” — Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson (who can’t define “woman”) lamented that a strong expression guarantee might impede government.

“My biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing government in significant ways,” she said to attorneys supportive of open expression.

Of course, among the First Amendment’s goals is preventing powerful authorities from stifling citizen speech by protecting our liberty to express controversial ideas.

The Tinker-era Supreme Court understood that.

DC Larson, a writer, lives in Waterloo. Contact: davidcharleslarson@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Big government partisans crush conservative student speech