This is the Daily Media Update published by the Institute for Free Speech. For press inquiries, please contact Luke Wachob at [email protected].
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We're Hiring!
.....The Institute for Free Speech is hiring a Senior Attorney with a minimum of seven years of experience. The location for this position is either at our Washington, D.C. office or remotely anywhere in the United States.
This is a rare opportunity to work with a growing team to litigate a long-term legal strategy directed toward the protection of Constitutional rights. We challenge laws, practices, and policies that infringe upon First Amendment freedoms, such as speech codes that censor parents at school board meetings, laws restricting people’s ability to give and receive campaign contributions, and any intrusion into people’s private political associations. You would work to hold censors accountable; and to secure legal precedents clearing away a thicket of laws, regulations, and practices that suppress speech about government and candidates for political office, threaten citizens’ privacy if they speak or join groups, and impose heavy burdens on political activity.
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In the News
By Chamian Cruz
.....The Forsyth County Board of Education will consider approving two policies in September dealing with public participation in board meetings and its rules of conduct...
[One] change is that “loud and boisterous conduct or comments” will not be allowed. The current policy states speakers should keep remarks to the board “civil” while avoiding “obscene” or “profane” language. Those who violate the proposed policy will be given a warning before being asked to sit down.
“If any person attending a meeting refuses to follow these rules disrupting the meeting, they will be asked to leave and if they refuse, be escorted from the meeting room,” it states. “Such serious or repeated violations of the rules of conduct may result in the individual being prohibited from speaking during a board meeting for an appropriate period of time.” ...
During one meeting in March, Wes McCall, chairman of the Forsyth County Board of Education, called for a recess after he repeatedly asked Alison Hair, a parent of a former student in the school district, to stop reading sexually explicit excerpts from school library books.
The public was allowed to return to the meeting one by one to finish their comments to the board, but Hair says she left and stopped attending board meetings altogether for fear of retaliation. She claims the board sent her two separate letters after the meeting indicating she had been banned from the meetings unless she agreed to submit a statement in writing agreeing to follow the board’s public participation rules and McCall’s directives as chairman.
Then, in July, Hair and a local group known as Mama Bears of Forsyth County filed suit in federal court against the school board on grounds that their First Amendment rights had been violated. Hair accuses the board of seven violations, including to her right of free speech, right to petition, vagueness, overbreadth and prior restraint.
The lawsuit asks the court to issue an order preventing Forsyth County Schools and board officials from enforcing the ban against Hair’s participation in board meetings and “several unconstitutional provisions” of its public participation policy.
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By John Anastasi
.....[The Pennsbury School District] was embroiled in a lawsuit in which four residents claimed the board was using provisions in its policy code to deny their right to comment on a variety of issues. The district eventually settled. Its insurance carrier paid the $300,000 settlement and most of the money ended up going to attorneys and the Institute of Free Speech.
The school district also had to delete its so-called “civility policy,” which outlawed comments that were “verbally abusive,” “disruptive” and “intolerant.” It also had to tweak its policy covering public participation at meetings to remove restrictions on statements that were “personally directed,” “abusive,” “irrelevant,” “offensive,” “otherwise inappropriate” or “personal attacks.”
For what it’s worth, the plaintiffs in the case — Lower Makefield residents Douglas Marshall, Robert Abrams, Simon Campbell and Tim Daly — wouldn’t characterize their statements from December 2020 and the first half of 2021 to be any of those things. They claimed they were merely voicing sentiments the board did not like. Either way, those forms of expression are protected by the First Amendment.
The Pennsbury board also had to stop cutting commenters short before the end of their allotted time, deleting their remarks from the meeting minutes or editing them out of archived videos of the proceedings, which was viewed as suppression of certain views and an infringement on constitutionally protected speech.
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Free Expression
By Christiana Kiefer
.....The First Amendment guarantees that all Americans, including those who teach at public schools, have the right to speak and act in accordance with their deeply held beliefs—even if those beliefs are offensive to someone else. If the Biden administration gets its way, that right to freedom of speech will be in grave danger.
The administration is trying to change the definition of “sex” in Title IX to include “gender identity”—a seemingly small change. In practice, however, this change would compel professors, teachers, and administrators at public schools and universities to address and treat students based on students’ self-identified “gender identity,” whether by addressing students by their “preferred pronouns” or verbally affirming the claims of gender identity ideology. Professors, teachers, and administrators would be required to do this, even if doing so goes against their deeply held beliefs. Dissent will not be tolerated.
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By Yascha Mounk
.....The second brewing conflict is about limits on free speech. So long as abortions required an in-person medical procedure, the pro-life movement could hope to reduce them by shutting down local clinics offering the service. Now that comparatively cheap and convenient workarounds exist for most cases, effective curbs on abortion require the extra step of preventing people from finding out about these alternatives. That is putting many members of the pro-life movement, be they Mississippi’s attorney general or Republican legislators in several states who are trying to pass draconian restrictions on information and advice about abortions, on a collision course with the First Amendment.
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Political Giving
By Kenneth P. Vogel and Shane Goldmacher
.....A new conservative nonprofit group scored a $1.6 billion windfall last year via a little-known donor — an extraordinary sum that could give Republicans and their causes a huge financial boost ahead of the midterms, and for years to come.
The source of the money was Barre Seid, an electronics manufacturing mogul, and the donation is among the largest — if not the largest — single contributions ever made to a politically focused nonprofit. The beneficiary is a new political group controlled by Leonard A. Leo, an activist who has used his connections to Republican donors and politicians to help engineer the conservative dominance of the Supreme Court and to finance battles over abortion rights, voting rules and climate change policy…
“It’s high time for the conservative movement to be among the ranks of George Soros, Hansjörg Wyss, Arabella Advisors and other left-wing philanthropists, going toe-to-toe in the fight to defend our constitution and its ideals,” Mr. Leo said.
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The States
By Tom Leach
.....While most individuals will immediately look to the recent protests at the homes of Supreme Court justices as the impetus for New Jersey Senate Bill 2964, which would establish a criminal offense for the targeted picketing of an individual’s residence and prohibit the release of addresses, introduced by state Senator Ed Durr, (R-Swedesboro), the reality is this legislation offers protections that any reasonable person would want for their family.
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Read an article you think we would be interested in? Send it to Tiffany Donnelly at [email protected]. For email filters, the subject of this email will always begin with "Institute for Free Speech Media Update."
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The Institute for Free Speech is a nonpartisan, nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that promotes and defends the First Amendment rights to freely speak, assemble, publish, and petition the government. Please support the Institute's mission by clicking here. For further information, visit www.ifs.org.
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