Supreme Court rejects pro-life student club suspended over Planned Parenthood flyers
The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to rule whether a public school violated a pro-life student's free speech rights by rejecting her club's anti-Planned Parenthood flyers.
In an orders list posted Monday morning, the Supreme Court denied without comment a petition for a writ of certiorari in the case of E. D., a minor, by her parent and next friend, Lisa Duell, et al. v. Noblesville School District, et al., allowing a lower court ruling against the student to stand.
Justice Samuel Alito authored a dissent from the denial, writing that the nation's highest court needs to address the extent of public school students' First Amendment rights.
“I would grant the petition to clarify the relationship between Hazelwood and our subsequent government-speech decisions. In an appropriate case, we should do so,” Alito wrote.
Alito referenced the 1988 Supreme Court case Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier, in which the high court ruled 5-3 that a high school principal had a legitimate interest in censoring a student newspaper.
“The distinction between private speech and government speech is critical because the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment constrains censorship of the first category only,” he added. “When Hazelwood was decided, this Court’s decisions had never even mentioned the term ‘government speech.’”
In 2021, a student identified as E.D. got permission to start a Students for Life of America chapter at Noblesville High School. For the student club flyers, E.D. included photos of people holding signs that read "Defund Planned Parenthood" and "I Am the Pro-Life Generation."
School officials rejected the flyers due to the sign photos and temporarily suspended the student organization, suspecting that the club was being led by adults instead of students.
E.D. filed a complaint against officials, and a district court ruled in favor of the school administrators and the school district officials.
Last August, a three-judge panel of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld the district court ruling, with Circuit Judge Nancy L. Maldonado, a Biden appointee, authoring the opinion.
Maldonado wrote that the flyers, based on their posting location, would have been reasonably construed as government speech and thus were not protected by the First Amendment.
“This is not a case about tolerating private student speech. To the contrary, E.D. was permitted to wear her pro-life shirt to school and hand out her flyers to students at the activities fair,” Maldonado wrote.
“Instead, it is a case about whether the school must lend its resources (here, literally its walls) — and, by extension, its authority — to disseminate student messages.”
Maldonado concluded that the school district’s “restriction on political content in student flyers is reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns.”
“The school designated its walls as a limited public forum for the narrow purpose of allowing student clubs to advertise only meeting times and locations,” she continued. “Excluding political content, in particular, serves the pedagogical goal of maintaining neutrality on matters of political controversy.”
Students for Life of America President Kristan Hawkins denounced the appeals court panel ruling against the SFLA chapter in comments given to The Christian Post last year.
"It's extraordinary how in the woke environment over the last few years, schools have accommodated kids dressed up like animals and every kind of club imaginable, and yet we are still fighting for the rights of pro-life students to be heard," Hawkins said.
"The case continues because the Pro-Life Generation supports those students working to share their love of preborn babies and their concern for their friends, targeted by a predatory abortion industry.”
