The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a case involving public school students who were banned from wearing “Let’s Go Brandon” sweatshirts to class, because officials said the slogan was “profane.”
Lower courts had agreed with the Tri County Area School District in Michigan, finding that although there was no explicit profanity in the words, the intent of the words was vulgar.
The slogan had become a crude equivalent of saying “F—- Joe Biden.”
People were interested in these podcasts
The high court didn’t offer a reason for refusing the appeal, and no justice noted a dissent. It was rejected among dozens of other cases that had piled up over the high court’s summer vacation.
Other rejections included the Justice Department’s request to restore a case against a man convicted of methamphetamine use, and a case involving whether an Alabama judge tainted a capital murder case by scaring jurors, after he arrested a juror who was 30 minutes late for court one day.
In the Brandon case, the two brothers who had tried to wear the sweatshirts to their middle school had argued that the clothing didn’t cross any lines and didn’t actually produce any disruption in school.
That, the boys’ lawyers argued, should have been the key test for being able to limit students’ First Amendment rights when it came to political speech.
But school officials argued that “almost all lewd speech” actually comes in coded phrases, and “Let’s Go Brandon” was clear to all in the school that it was a substitute for the F-word.
In their filing with the justices, they said students should be better behaved.
“Sixth graders should not flaunt their disagreements with teachers, students, or politicians by telling them to go F—- themselves,” the school system argued.
With the justices’ refusal, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision stands.
In that 2-1 ruling, Judge John Nalbandian, a Trump appointee, said the vulgarity of the speech was the crucial factor.
“In the schoolhouse, vulgarity trumps politics,” he wrote.
Judge John Bush, another Trump appointee, dissented.
He said his colleagues were treating the use of the F-word as a sexual reference rather than a political reference.
“If we allow schools the power to censor political speech by recharacterizing it as vulgarity, we risk turning disagreement with political speech into justification for its censorship — something the First Amendment flatly forbids,” he wrote.
The Brandon phraseology developed in 2021, when fans at a NASCAR race were chanting the actual F-word attack on President Biden, but a television reporter interviewing driver Brandon Brown misheard them and thought they were saying “Let’s Go Brandon.”
Contact the author
Please read our comment policy before commenting.