The Naming Wars Continue in Virginia
Southern Heritage Again on Trial in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley
Southern Heritage Again on Trial in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley
(Dixie Drudge) - Once again the PC people have found themselves a plaintiff to claim his/her rights have been violated. And once again it is ending in multiple court cases. The process is part of the punishment, you know. The appeal is moving forward.
This time, Stonewall Jackson High school in Quicksburg, a small town in Virginia’s Shenandoah County is the target. First, the schoolboard dropped the name. Then angry residents, voted in a pro-Southern majority and the name was restored.
The leftists searched out for a plaintiff who deemed that his civil right to not be offended had been violated. Two black student-athletes joined the state naacp chapter and went judge shopping. They won the first case in front of a feral judge who ruled somehow that renaming the school violated the 1st Amendment. It was a convoluted ruling that even the New York Times found troubling. Judge Michael Urbanski of the Western District of Virginia ruled that the county’s decision was “exceptionally symbolic” and intended to send a “message favoring Stonewall Jackson. The school was forcing the athletes to wear a jersey that served as a ‘mobile billboard’ endorsing Jackson against their will.
As the City-Journal reported:
This logic is not limited to this case’s immediate context, in which the county was replacing a Confederate’s name. Every school named after a public figure, regardless of that school’s history, would be subject to the court’s ruling. Thomas Jefferson, for example, is the namesake of more than 450 schools nationwide. At each of those schools, the school board sent a “message” variously endorsing him. In many cases, student-athletes at those schools wear jerseys bearing his name, serving as “mobile billboards” for the school board’s message…
Stay tuned as the latest ruling could get even more convoluted. A Jewish or Muslim athlete might suddenly be offended by wearing a helmet at University of Arkansas with a Razorback logo. Bogus rulings have far-reaching consequenses…
The "mobile billboard" logic here is pretty wild when u think about it. If wearing a school name on a jersey constitutes compelled speech, that opens up precedent for just about any institutional naming decision to be chalenged under the First Amendment. The ruling basicaly treats symbolic association as equivalent to direct endorsement, which could get messy fast in contexts way beyond this particular case.