Judge stuns with ruling that children are too young for 1st Amendment rights
A leftist judge in California has issued a stunning ruling that children are too young for First Amendment rights, so teachers were right to punish a 7-year-old for expanding the Black Lives Matter mantra to include others.
Details of the startling conclusion by District Judge David Carter were documented by the Daily Mail.
The report describes how the little girl was punished, banned from recess and ordered not to draw pictures at Viejo Elementary in Orange.
Her offense? Adding the words “any life” to a Black Lives Matter image.
The judge endorsed the punishment as she’s “too young to have First Amendment rights.”
“The girl’s family filed a lawsuit last year against the Capistrano Unified School District, claiming her First Amendment Rights were violated during the 2021 incident,” the report explained. But Carter now has claimed, “Students have the right to be free from speech that denigrates their race while at school” and that the girl was not protected by the First Amendment because of her age.
Carter claimed, “An elementary school … is not a marketplace of ideas… Thus, the downsides of regulating speech there is not as significant as it is in high schools, where students are approaching voting age and controversial speech could spark conducive conversation.”
He said as there are no rights, the decision what to punish rests with the school.
The judge tried to explain, “Undoubtedly, B.B.’s [the student] intentions were innocent… B.B. testified that she gifted the Drawing to M.C. to make her feel comfortable after her class learned about Martin Luther King Jr.”
But the friend, M.C., took the image home and her parents “found it offensive” and demanded the school take action.
The report documented: “This prompted principal Jesus Becerra to tell B.B. the drawing was inappropriate and racist. He then punished B.B. by making her publicly apologize on the playground to her classmates and teachers. B.B. was also banned from recess and from drawing pictures for two weeks.”
B.B.’s mother brought the action because her daughter did no wrong.
The case now goes to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to consider what observers are describing as a dangerous precedent depriving elementary students of constitutional rights.
Lawyer Caleb Trotter said, “If that view is allowed to survive and spread, the speech rights of countless elementary students around the country could be at risk. That was what really concerned me.”
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