Just last year in California, a federal court declared a first grader’s crayon drawing may constitute “impermissible harassment.” Ironic, perhaps, that such a decision was made in nation where—starting in elementary school—talk about the founding principle of liberty and the sanctity of an individual’s rights are drummed into the people daily.
Are such lessons serious? Were they ever?
This crayon drawing episode and its aftermath is not some dystopian fiction but came as a heavy dose of reality in an Orange County elementary school, where the phrase “Black Lives Mater” (sic), accompanied by the words “any life,” was deemed a punishable offense.
The case, B.B. v. Capistrano Unified School Dist., reads like a parody of modern American life. Yet it is all too real, and all too indicative of the country’s present trajectory. The simplicity of the facts, however, makes this episode noticeably chilling.
Reflect. Has venerable Orange County, long a bastion of conservativism and the last Republican stronghold within the Golden State, become a place where the freedom to think (or doodle) is subject to the whims of those styling themselves as arbiters of acceptable opinion?
For this is the same county that helped deliver California to Nixon three times in presidential elections, Reagan twice, Ford and Bush 41 once. In 1964, it was one of only five California counties to vote for Barry Goldwater, author of The Conscience of a Conservative. Today, a Republican only holds one of the six congressional districts serving Orange County residents.
Today, progressives and liberals dominate both the political and cultural landscape. Take the B.B. case where, in her first grade class, a six-year-old girl, referred to in court documents as “B.B.,” drew a picture. On it, she wrote “Black Lives Mater” in bold black marker. Beneath it, in lighter colors, the phrase “any life.”
She gave this drawing to a classmate.
For B.B.’s audacity, the principal summoned her to the office, accused the girl of racism, and forced her to apologize. B.B.’s other artistic endeavors were summarily banned, and she was barred from recess for two weeks.
Recall. This was the first grade.
Has the schoolhouse not become simply another battleground in the culture war, but the frontline in the theater of operations?
No longer are blackboards allowed. They’ve been replaced by an ideological whiteboard.
Within the classroom, the teaching profession has metamorphosed from those who deliver curricula to students to those serving as commissars of an aberrant culture.
Furthermore, the District Court’s decision was a masterclass in the art of abdication—abandoning reason, constitutional principle, and basic common sense. The court, in all its wisdom, determined that the First Amendment does not protect a first grader’s drawing if a teacher or administrator deems it “harassing” or “harmful.”
The reasoning, if we can call it that, states: “deference to schoolteachers is especially appropriate today, where, increasingly, what is harmful or innocent speech is in the eye of the beholder.”
The court openly admits that the standard is subjective. “Harm” is up to the school authorities to determine. The First Amendment, once a bulwark against tyranny, is now a mere suggestion, one that is easily discarded whenever it proves inconvenient to the reigning orthodoxy.
Justifying its constitutional vandalism, the court leaned on the Supreme Court decision, Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), which held that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” Yet, the Tinker standard permits schools to limit speech only when it “materially disrupts classwork or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others.”
Give ’em an inch and they’ll take a mile.
Search the record for any evidence that B.B.’s drawing caused a riot in the lunchroom or even a murmur of discontent in the classroom and it will be in vain. We should also safely assume that classroom competitions of Heads Up, Seven Up still went on without a hitch.
Yes, the first graders merely went on about their days. The supposed adults were the ones throwing fits and tantrums.
The only “disruption” was that of the school administration’s ideological tranquility. Put in the hands of the District Court, Tinker also twists into a license for censorship when the claim becomes protecting someone’s feelings.
This case is not an isolated incident. It is the logical culmination of a decades-long campaign to transform American schools from places of learning into laboratories of ideological conformity.
To wit: The phrase “Black Lives Matter” has attained the status of secular scripture. Try to contextualize, qualify, or even gently expand upon it—like B.B. did by adding the words “any life” —and you’re branded a heretic.
The court’s opinion made this explicit. In a Reason.com article from March 2024 discussing B.B. v. Capistrano, Eugene Volokh writes, “The ‘Black Lives Matter’ slogan is accepted as the one orthodoxy, and any perceived dissent from the view that black lives should be specially stressed in this context can be forbidden.”
Thus, the child who dares to suggest that all lives have value is branded a bigot, and the machinery of the state is brought to bear against her.
Volokh correctly identifies the danger posed by the court’s decision. He notes that the ruling “seems to be that this viewpoint is stripped of First Amendment protection,” and that “any perceived dissent from the view that black lives should be specially stressed in this context can be forbidden.”
