April 26, 2021 | 1:02 PM
WASHINGTON – The high school cheerleader relegated to the JV squad for another year responded with a fleeting fit of frustration: a photo of her upraised middle finger and another word that begins with F.
“F school, f softball, f cheer, f everything,” 14-year-old Brandi Levy typed into Snapchat one spring Saturday. Like all “snaps” posted to a Snapchat “story,” this one, sent to about 250 “friends,” was to disappear within 24 hours, before everyone returned to Pennsylvania’s Mahanoy Area High School on Monday.
Instead, an adolescent outburst and the adult reaction to it has arrived at the Supreme Court, where it could determine how the First Amendment’s protection of free speech applies to the off-campus activities of the nation’s 50 million public school students.
By Syndicated Content
By Andrew Chung
(Reuters) â A Pennsylvania teenager whose profanity-laced outburst on social media got her banished from her high schoolâs cheerleading squad is in the spotlight at the U.S. Supreme Court this week, arguing âI shouldnât have to be afraid to express myself.â
Brandi Levy, who made her Snapchat post away from school and on a weekend, is at the center of a major case testing the limits of the U.S. Constitutionâs First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech. The nine justices on Wednesday are set to hear arguments in the Mahanoy Area School Districtâs appeal of a lower court ruling in favor of Levy that found that the First Amendment bars public school officials from regulating off-campus speech.
Nicholas Goldberg: The Supreme Court debates the all-powerful F-word
Summary: This time the language wasn’t used to comment on a burning social issue. But isn’t it time we got over our squeamishness?
Written By:
Nicholas Goldberg, Los Angeles Times | 11:00 am, Apr. 26, 2021 ×
Fifty years ago, a 19-year-old L.A. man forced the Supreme Court to consider a provocative four-letter epithet.
(Samuel Corum/Getty Images/TNS)
The F-word will soon be coming to the nation’s most august courtroom again.
This time, it will get there courtesy of B.L., an anonymous young woman who wrote a profanity-filled Snapchat post after she was rejected for her high school’s varsity cheerleading team. Her post and her school’s decision to punish her for it has ignited a free speech case that will be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court next week.
WASHINGTON Fourteen-year-old Brandi Levy was having that kind of day where she just wanted to scream. So she did, in a profanity-laced posting on Snapchat that has, improbably, ended up before the Supreme Court in the most significant case on.