Issue Avoided.

I stumbled upon this article while procrastinating of facebook a couple of weeks ago, and at first didn’t think of it for a blog until I read the comments. The article is about a girl who wore a shirt that said ‘Marriage is so Gay’ on it to her public school one day and was forced to change. She went to the news and explained she just wanted to show her support for the gay community. The ACLU got involved, and it became a big deal. Majority of the comments are people explaining how they think that being gay is the equivalent to being a child rapist, somewhere criticizing the school, some criticizing her parents, and other saying that they supported her but felt that the shirt was inappropriate for school.

It was these last kinds of comments that got me to thinking about economic freedom, and freedom of speech and such. Regardless of how you feel on the subject of gay marriage, the real question at hand here has to do with ‘freedom of speech’ or rather it even more so has to do with private property. Many people will say it is her right to wear that shirt because of free speech, other will say it is the right of the students to not be distracted.The question that came up a lot was where do you draw the line? The example used most frequently was what if she had worn a shirt that said ‘Marriage is so Christian’? These people who asked these kinds of questions will probably never realize that they were questioning the entire right to free speech. But as we established in class because there is nowhere to draw the line, the right to free speech is rubbish.

Instead of trying to figure out whether or not this young girl was within her rights to wear the shirt or not, why not just enforce property rights? If the school was privately owned, the owner gets to make the rules, and say yes you can wear that shirt to school or no, you can’t wear that shirt. If the girl and her parents don’t like it, they can go to another school, and the same extends for other students and parents.