No Wonder the Courts Are Clogged

The basis of the lawsuit (Chron photo)

Your humble blogger, a non-lawyer, has viewed with aghast the burgeoning laws and regulations that over his lifetime "growed like Topsy".

And there's no natural brake to this phenomenon. A wrong or injustice is noted, some citizens cry "there ought to be a law", and the legislature responds. Presto, a law is created which governs a human activity that was heretofore outside the legal system's ambit.

Is it any wonder that the courts are backlogged?

A 7 year-old girl handed a drawing to a classmate, a lawsuit resulted, and the case may be appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.[bold added]

A California 7-year-old was banned from drawing pictures at school and forced to sit out recess for two weeks for adding “any life” below Black Lives Matter on a picture she drew and gave to a Black friend, punishments that led to a federal lawsuit.

At the core of the case, which could see its way to the Supreme Court, is a simple question: Do first graders have First Amendment rights? ...

What happened at Viejo Elementary School three years ago is undisputed. The student, identified as B.B., drew the picture, which also included four colored-in ovals representing herself and three friends, after a lesson on Martin Luther King, Jr., and gave it to her friend, M.C., who took it home, where her mother saw it.

The mother emailed the school, saying she wouldn’t “tolerate any more messages given to M.C. at school because of her skin color” and that she ‘trust(ed)’ the school would address the issue,” according to court records.

The principal confronted B.B. and told her the drawing was “inappropriate” and “racist” and that she couldn’t draw at school anymore and had to apologize to her friend. When she returned to class, her teachers told her she was not allowed to play at recess for two weeks.

A year after the incident, B.B.’s mother learned of her punishments and later sued the school district and administrators, claiming her daughter’s First Amendment rights were violated. She lost in the district court.

[Defense attorney Caleb] Trotter said he believes the judge erred in the fact that the drawing was not disruptive and then relied on a New York Times article, which was not part of the case record, to deem the “any life” part of the drawing as offensive, associating it with the “all lives matter” controversy.

“Testimony in this case clearly shows neither student knew any of what this meant,” Trotter said. “The school created this situation by introducing these adult topics.”

The legal issue at hand is whether then-7-year-old "B.B." has any free-speech rights, and the District Court ruled against her (really, her parents, who had sued the school district for suspending her). But the school district, IMHO, should never have introduced the Black Lives matter/All Lives matter dispute into a second-grade class, then punished a student for her misunderstanding of the subtleties.

According to the people who are eager to find offensiveness under every rock, "any life" is an allusion to "all lives matter", which reveals the racism of the writer or speaker. For the school district to a) buy into this interpretation and b) punish the 7-year-old for her bad thinking is a gross overstep of in loco parentis. For your humble blogger the removal of identity-politics ideology from public education, especially elementary schools, can't come too soon.