In the past year I’ve written about a school district in Los Angeles that launched an investigation when a gay teacher told his students he got married, something straight teachers do everyday. I’ve written about a local gay teacher who suffered the wrath of the Fallbrook Union High School District when he merely asked the district to take action against students who repeatedly called him a “fuck’n faggot.”

What I haven’t told you about are the dozens of other cases in which GLBT students, teachers and staff report to me via email on how their school districts have failed to provide a safe learning and working environment – a situation that should have been remedied by now with the passage of a state law mandating school districts to take measures to ensure safety for GLBT students, faculty and staff.

And that’s why we all should take pride that the Poway Unified School District is vigorously defending a lawsuit filed on June 2 by Tyler Chase Harper, a high school student claiming the school violated his First Amendment rights to free speech when he was suspended for wearing a T-shirt proclaiming “Homosexuality is shameful”.

As Travis D. Bone reported in this paper in June, Harper initially wore the shirt in protest of the school’s observance of the National Day of Silence, an annual protest where students take a vow of silence to represent GLBT students who don’t have a voice or representation in their school. Harper used masking tape and a black marker to make the shirt that read “Be Ashamed. Our school has embraced what God has condemned” across the front of it, and “Homosexuality is shameful. Romans 1:27” across the back of the shirt. School administrators warned Harper that the shirt violated the school’s dress code, which prohibits homemade shirts with slogans or messages, as well as clothing and accessories, that promote or portray “violence or hate behavior including derogatory connotations directed towards sexual identity.”

Harper wore a similar shirt the following day, and school officials met with him and informed him that he had to remove the shirt or face an in-school suspension for the day. Harper refused to remove the shirt and was removed from classes for the rest of the day.

The school district has retained California’s leading education attorney, Daniel R. Shinoff, of Stutz, Artiano, Shinoff & Hotz, to defend the school district in this action.

Shinoff told The Los Angeles Daily Journal that the “school’s legal obligation to create an environment free from discrimination trumps Harper’s individual rights. That’s why we have separation of church and state.”

Shinoff knows this terrain very well. Like me, he’s Jewish. When I met him 20 years ago he wore a yarmulke. For a time he served as president of the San Diego Jewish Academy, a private school. He knows first-hand that Jewish teens (like gay teens) often experience physical and verbal abuse, often carried out by others asserting a religious basis for doing so. Shinoff knows that T-shirts featuring a swastika or certain Biblical scriptures convey the same message to Jewish students that Harper’s T-shirt conveys to GLBT students: You deserve to die for what you believe or who you are.

And the Supreme Court has made it clear that messages like that do not have a place in a public school classroom, where children are compelled by law (and economic circumstances) to attend. Harper can wear the shirt off school grounds; he can join a religious club on campus and make his views known there. But a gay teacher or student doesn’t have to tolerate something particularly designed to advocate violence and condemnation.

In 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court in Tinker v. Des Moines upheld the rights of high school students to engage in silent war protest by wearing black armbands to school. The students were the sons and daughters of pacifists. They did not intend to mock anyone, nor could school officials reasonably suspect so.

And that’s why the Supreme Court upheld their right to wear the armbands. But the Court made it clear that students cannot wear clothing designed to mock or harm other students or teachers and cause disruption. In subsequent cases, federal courts have upheld actions by school officials to prohibit students from wearing confederate flag T-shirts to school.

One court upheld a principal’s move to discipline a student who wore a Marilyn Manson T-shirt to school that read: “Jesus LIES.” The principal believed that shirt would be hostile to Christians on campus.

A few months ago, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the firings of employees who engaged in anti-gay conduct while at work. One case involved a man who posted anti-gay Biblical scripture atop his cubicle, where customers and employees could see it.

The court ruled the comments created a hostile working environment for all employees, not just gays and lesbians.

In the latest case, a supervisor merely kept requesting a lesbian employee to go with her to church so she could “change her ways.” The Ninth Circuit concluded that her efforts amounted to harassment of the lesbian employee and her employer could fire her.

In both of these cases, the fired employees sued on the basis that they were punished because of their Christian views. But the courts concluded correctly that the right to work in a hostile free environment trumps religious views. Amen.