The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear a major free speech case.
The case involves high school valedictorian Brittany McComb who made a graduation speech at Foothill High School in Henderson, Nevada. School officials warned her to remove references to her religion from the speech, but she decided not to do so based on her constitutionally protected free speech. "When she got to the point that she talked about the Lord and started to mention Jesus, the microphone was turned off by school officials," reports John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute. "And of course the crowd responded by jeering it, and a number of people chanted, 'let her speak.'" The Rutherford Institute requested that the Supreme Court hear the student's case, charging the violation of McComb's free speech rights and discrimination for censoring her speech's Christian content. The Court denied the petition without explanation. Whitehead also tells OneNewsNow that the Supreme Court's decision marks a sad day for the cause of freedom. "I think the Supreme Court that we have now is pretty close to being an anti-civil, libertarian Supreme Court. It's not going to rule essentially against schools at all, except in rare circumstances," the attorney notes. "They're going to be very pro-statist authority, very pro-public schools, and we've been moving in this direction for a long time, and it's a dangerous direction of just order and conformity in the schools." Whitehead feels that the Supreme Court would have heard the case had it taken place 15 or 20 years ago because it used to hear about 180 cases of this nature per year. However, that number has dropped to a yearly average of 70. Despite this statistic, the Rutherford Institute intends to continue pressing free speech cases.
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