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October 31, 2008

Student suspended for publishing conservative website (updated)

Thomas Lifson
Back in the USSR, they sent dissidents to psychiatric confinement; in ultra-blue Marin County, they suspend them from school and send them for "psychological evaluation."

According to the Marin Independent-Journal:

Although school officials declined to comment on his case, [Cyrus] Massoumi, 17, a senior [at Redwood High School], said he was suspended from school Wednesday for distributing flyers directing students to his online newspaper, which he previously stored on a school computer server.

He admits there are articles in The Deadwood Barf -- a parody of the school newspaper The Redwood Bark -- that many people might find offensive. But the Larkspur teen believes school administrators went too far in their response, sending a security guard to remove him from class and asking him to undergo a psychological evaluation.

"They asked me to sign a 'no violence' contract, saying that if I refused they would call the police and have me declared a physical threat," Massoumi said. "It's ridiculous."

If the student violated school policy by distributing leaflets on campus, is it appropriate to behave as the school did? When asked to do so, he removed his website from the school's server and published it elsewhere. He stopped distributing the pamphlets when asked.

I haven't reviewed the contents of his website, but unless there are exhortations to violence, this looks like an extreme overreaction, something another Marin County school district has a history of:

The Novato Unified School District had to pay former Novato High School student Andrew Smith $20,981 in legal fees in 2007 after a Marin Superior Court judge ruled the district had denied Smith's free speech rights in censoring a pair of opinion articles opposing illegal immigration that he wrote for the school paper in 2001.

There is a totalitarian streak among some liberals, who wish to define conservatism as illegal and unworthy of representation in the public forum. I know graduates of Redwood High School, one of the wealthiest school districts in the nation. Frankly, this doesn't surprise me.

Hat tip: Bookworm

Update --: Bookworm writes:

I did a post on it.  I read the student's writing, which was painful, because he's just a horrible writer.  Horrible or not, though, it didn't strike me as threatening in any way.  It's very un-PC:  it makes nasty remarks about ugly girls, nasty remarks about gays, and (which actually isn't un-PC in liberal land) is hostile to Israel.  Even taking the good (and there are germs of real thought in there), the bad (foolish thoughts), and the ugly (lots of insults), it's not a scary document.  If this student is correct about what happened, the school district overreacted big time.  It would be interesting to see whether there's more to the story from the district's side.

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