Latest news with #AllianceDefendingFreedom
CNN
2 days ago
- General
- CNN
Free Speech or Disruption? SCOTUS Declines to Hear Student Gender Shirt Case
Massachusetts middle school student Liam Morrison's T-shirt reading 'There Are Only Two Genders' has ignited a national debate over free speech in schools. After being sent home twice—once for the original message and again for a censored version—the Morrison family sued, claiming a First Amendment violation. Liam's attorney, David Cortman, who is senior counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, joins Michael Smerconish to dig into the case and SCOTUS decision.
CNN
3 days ago
- General
- CNN
Free Speech or Disruption? SCOTUS Declines to Hear Student Gender Shirt Case
Massachusetts middle school student Liam Morrison's T-shirt reading 'There Are Only Two Genders' has ignited a national debate over free speech in schools. After being sent home twice—once for the original message and again for a censored version—the Morrison family sued, claiming a First Amendment violation. Liam's attorney, David Cortman, who is senior counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, joins Michael Smerconish to dig into the case and SCOTUS decision.
Fox News
3 days ago
- General
- Fox News
Minnesota softball player, parent speak out as trans pitcher dominates postseason
Minnesota's high school softball postseason has been overshadowed by the dominance of a transgender pitcher at Champlin Park High School. The pitcher led Champlin Park to the state tournament with a dominant shutout victory in the sectional final on Thursday. Meanwhile, a lawsuit by three anonymous female players has been filed against the state for allowing the player to compete. The law firm representing the plaintiffs, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), has provided statements from one of the female players about her experience facing the trans athlete. "Hitting against him is not only a physical challenge but a mental, too. It's a mental battle knowing that he has an advantage in the sport that I grew up playing, making it hard to even want to hit against him. His ability to get outs and spin the ball is a strong advantage, but like I said it's also incredibly mentally challenging knowing that you're competing against someone who has unfair advantages leaving you with little to no confidence," the player said. "This issue has affected me in ways that I never imagined. It's simply unfair and I hate that nothing is happening to change that. Boys should not be able to take girls spots on teams just because they are capable of doing so. I hope that more girls affected by this issue will stand up against this." The anonymous player also called out Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison for aggressively defending trans inclusion in girls' sports in the state. Ellison has filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump and the U.S. Department of Justice over Trump's "Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports" executive order. "It's really upsetting to know that [Ellison] isn't taking rights of girls and women seriously. He is allowing boys to compete with girls, and it is not safe and completely unfair. To know that AG Ellison is in complete support of letting boys and men take advantage of females in sports is absolutely disgusting and wrong," the player added. A local Minnesota parent of another player who had to face the athlete spoke out about the situation during an interview on OutKick's "The Ricky Cobb Show." "It really comes down to cowardice leadership at the local state and federal level," said Garret Gross, the father of a local player. "Softball is different man, I'm telling you, these girls are strong, these girls are tough, but they're different than boys. At the highest levels, that ball is coming in 70-plus miles an hour from the pitcher's circle, which is only 43 feet away, and it's coming off that bat 80–85 miles an hour, and it's not question of if or when there will be a catastrophic injury or death that occurs because of this imbalance. The only question really is, is how old will the girl be that's killed and what will her name be? "That's a strong statement, but that's where it's going to get to and that's going to be really the only thing that's going to make the public wake up here, and the question to all the apathetic people on the sidelines, why are you keeping quiet when we know this is going to happen?" Champlin Park's school district provided a statement to Fox News Digital defending the decision to allow the athlete to compete on the softball team. "Throughout the entire season, and as the Rebels advance to the state tournament, it is important to note that all of the student athletes participating for the Champlin Park Softball team are eligible to compete in compliance with Minnesota State High School League rules and applicable state law. Due to data privacy laws, the District is not able to provide public comment regarding a specific student athlete," a statement from the Anoka-Hennepin School District stated. "In addition, the District is named in an active lawsuit which limits what information can be shared." After Trump signed the "Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports" executive order, the Minnesota State High School League announced it would defy federal law by allowing transgender athletes to continue playing in women's sports. Ellison then claimed at a press conference on April 22 that he received notice from the Department of Justice threatening legal action if the state did not follow the executive order, so the AG decided to sue first. The White House later responded to the lawsuit, condemning Ellison for taking legal action to enable trans inclusion. "Why would a grown man sue the Trump administration to allow other biological males to participate in women's sports? This is creepy and anti-woman," White House spokesperson Harrison Fields told Fox News Digital. Minnesota's state legislature failed to pass the "Preserving Girls' Sports Act" in early March, which would have stated that "only female students may participate in an elementary or secondary school level athletic team or sport that an educational institution has restricted to women and girls." Follow Fox News Digital's sports coverage on X, and subscribe to the Fox News Sports Huddle newsletter.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump administration looks to stop Big Tech censorship of conservatives
FTC Commissioner Melissa Holyoak, Utah's former solicitor general, said that addressing unfair censorship by Big Tech platforms is a priority for the Trump administration because of its importance to maintaining a strong democracy. In an interview with the Deseret News, Holyoak said the Federal Trade Commission's request for public comment on censorship by technology companies will give the FTC the ability to plan enforcement actions and inform Congress about the extent of the problem. 'It's one of the most important questions of our day,' Holyoak said. 'Big Tech has become part of the public modern square in that this is where people are interacting, this is where they're getting their news.' Nearly 3,000 individuals or companies, including several free speech organizations, responded to the FTC's public comment period. But the question of whether biased content moderation policies should result in federal intervention, including the breakup of companies, has polarized advocates. The conservative legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom submitted its response on Wednesday in a letter chronicling what it considers to be extensive examples of Big Tech using vague policies to censor speech. The group alleges that Meta (the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp), Google and Apple have relied on subjective criteria that penalizes posts that go against certain government policies. One instance cited by Alliance Defending Freedom is the temporary suspension of the accounts for the pro-life website and LifeNews CEO Steven Ertelt in January. Other organizations, including the International Center for Law and Economics and the Cato Institute, submitted comments in opposition to FTC action, arguing that content moderation does not represent a misuse of market power. Policies that disproportionately restrict conservative viewpoints exist, according to Holyoak. The question is whether tech platforms are misleading in their 'terms and conditions' about how these policies are used, and whether the use of these policies reveals a lack of competition. 'You can imagine a social media company that acquires a ton of monopoly power,' Holyoak said. 'They could do things that could harm consumers in many ways, including, for example, by degrading the product quality, and one manifestation of that could be the content and the moderation policies.' But concern over content moderation that bleeds into censorship goes beyond the impacts on consumers. If left unchecked, these policies could have a negative impact on Americans' ability to exercise their citizenship, Holyoak said. Ensuring that massive social media platforms allow 'both the access and the opportunity for people to be able to share their ideas' is, according to Holyoak, 'critical to our country as it operates, and to democracy, frankly, in general.' One conservative influencer shared with the Deseret News how he believes the addition of artificial intelligence to the most dominant social media platforms could shape the future of U.S. elections. Robby Starbuck, an anti-DEI activist and former music video director, filed a lawsuit against Meta last month, alleging that the $1.6 trillion behemoth committed defamation by knowingly distributing false statements about him to third parties for over nine months. Since filing the lawsuit, Starbuck has learned that previous versions of Meta's AI program that still contain the false claims about his ideological views and criminal background were downloaded millions of times to develop new apps without the ability to correct the information. The ability for AI to make authoritative statements about an individual that are demonstrably false, and the reticence Meta allegedly showed in responding, foreshadows a concerning future where insurance programs, reputation scoring and candidate information could be based on lies produced by AI, Starbuck said. 'You can very easily imagine a scenario where you shift an election by a couple percentage points,' Starbuck said, 'especially with the uptake of use by young people, when it comes to AI for questions, and the high percentage of them that believe everything AI tells them.' Republicans have for years alleged Big Tech uses tactics to oppose conservatives. In 2022, the Republican National Committee filed an ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit against Alphabet, accusing Google of intentionally sending the party's email messages to spam folders. On Wednesday, the NRCC and NRSC, the House and Senate Republican campaign committees, called on the FTC to investigate whether Google's email platform suppressed messages to potential conservative donors. Examples like these suggest that certain Big Tech companies wield so much market dominance that they are unafraid of harming consumers who have little to no alternative to their products, Starbuck said. 'Just look at the behavior of Big Tech companies like Meta during COVID and the ability to censor information that ultimately ended up being true and there being no real recourse for people that that happened to,' Starbuck said. Since mid-April, the FTC has waged a courtroom battle against Meta, alleging that the company pursued mergers with Instagram and WhatsApp over a decade ago with the deliberate purpose of eliminating competitors. Meta has attempted to get the federal lawsuit dismissed, arguing that the two apps became better for consumers after the mergers and that the FTC's definition of relevant competitors is too narrow because it does not include TikTok, YouTube or X. Jennifer Huddleston, a senior fellow in technology policy at the Cato Institute, said there has been a shift in recent years on both sides of the aisle, but especially among conservatives, to view big technology platforms as 'automatically bad.' Huddleston, who authored a comment urging the FTC not to conflate unfair content moderation with anti-competitive practices, said that increasing the scope of antitrust policy to include censorship could open the door to increasingly political interventions from the FTC. 'Is this actually about concerns related to market behavior, or is this about animosity towards tech companies?' Huddleston asked. 'Antitrust is designed for a very specific purpose related to competition, and if we start seeing it opened for these other policy purposes, it could lose that objective standard and be a way that the government can make many excuses to intervene in a wide array of markets.' Huddleston said she believes this kind of intervention could actually make censorship worse if companies are broken up and have less resources for content moderation, or are afraid of FTC action and adopt more narrow content policies. An antitrust approach to Big Tech is unnecessary, she said, because current law does not require neutrality in content moderation policies and there is a wide array of competition for users looking for different content moderation standards. If an individual doesn't like the quality of discourse on Meta, they can migrate to more conservative alternatives — like X or Truth Social — or to more liberal ones — like Bluesky or Threads, Huddleston pointed out. 'Once a government has been given a power, it's very hard to get that power back,' she said. 'The power won't just be with an FTC that you might happen to agree with politically, it would also be with an FTC that you might disagree with politically.'
Daily Mail
7 days ago
- General
- Daily Mail
Outrage as teen who was banned from school over 'only two genders' shirt LOSES latest appeal
A teen's freedom of speech case has made it all the way up to the Supreme Court after he was sent home from school over two years ago for wearing a shirt that said, 'There are only two genders.' The Supreme Court declined to hear Liam Morrison's appeal, upholding a district court's decision siding with Nichols Middle School in Middleborough, Massachusetts, a suburb outside of Boston. The First Circuit Court ruled that the school had the right to prohibit students' viewpoints if they were harmful, citing that the message was offensive to transgender students. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented, with Alito writing that the case, 'presents an issue of great importance for our Nation's youth.' The Alliance Defending Freedom and the Massachusetts Family Institute are defending Liam and his parents in the case. 'We're disappointed the Supreme Court chose not to hear this critical free speech case,' ADF Senior Counsel and Vice President of U.S. Litigation David Cortman said in a statement after the ruling. 'Students don't lose their free speech rights the moment they walk into a school building. Schools can't suppress students' views they disagree with,' Cortman continued. 'Here, the school actively promotes its view about gender through posters and "Pride" events, and it encourages students to wear clothing with messages on the same topic—so long as that clothing expresses the school's preferred views on the subject.' The case cites a landmark ruling in 1969, Tinker v. Des Moines, which set precedent that students don't shed their right to free speech at school unless it causes 'substantial disruption.' The controversial saga originated over two years ago, when Liam, who was in seventh grade at the time, was asked to remove the divisive shirt. When he refused, his father, Christopher Morrison, was called to pick him up. Liam then returned to school with a piece of tape over the words 'only two' and wrote 'censored,' instead. Liam has since stood by his decision to wear the shirt, accusing his middle school of stripping him of his right to freedom of speech. 'What did my shirt say? Five simple words: "There are only two genders,"' Liam said at a school board meeting shortly after. 'Nothing harmful. Nothing threatening. Just a statement I believe to be a fact.' The family then filed the suit, citing the town of Middleborough, the previous acting school principal Heather Tucker, the Middleborough School Committee, and Middleborough Public Schools superintendent Carolyn J. Lyons. In June, the district court sided with the school, agreeing that educators didn't violate Liam's First Amendment rights. However, last October, Liam's family appealed his case to the Supreme Court in hopes of a different outcome. 'This case isn't about T-shirts; it's about a public school telling a middle-schooler that he isn't allowed to express a view that differs from their own,' Cortman said at the time. Liam wrote an op-ed featured in Fox News in February titled, 'My middle school silenced my free speech T-shirts about "two genders." I'm fighting back.' In his essay, Liam said that his parents taught him to challenge his thinking and come to his own conclusions without outside influences. 'It's natural for our family to have those conversations where we share our different thoughts and views. Shouldn't that be natural and encouraged at school, too?' he wrote. Deborah Ecker, the lawyer representing the school, previously argued that educators were within their rights to ask Liam not to wear the shirt. 'Looking at what the school officials knew about their school, the age of the kids, the LGBTQ community in that school, and the real mental health concerns, their decision to have the plaintiff remove the T-shirt was reasonable.' 'They reasonably could forecast that the message, if he was allowed to wear it in the school and in a classroom, would reasonably cause a disruption to the school work and invade the rights of other students.' School officials also argued that the student handbook prohibits clothing implying hate speech based on 'race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, religious affiliation or any other classification.' The school's superintendent defended the decision, noting that some students 'have attempted to commit suicide or have had suicidal ideations in the past few years, including members of the LGBTQ+ community,' Reuters reported. The superintendent added that some of the students' struggles were related to the mistreatment they received because of their gender identity. Liam's case has made national headlines since he was sent home over two years ago. The political climate has changed since then, with President Trump signing an executive order on his first day in office titled, 'Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.' The order redefined the definition of sex as a biological classification of male or female. It also required Americans to have their biological sex listed on all federal documentation instead of their gender identity. The political climate has changed since Liam first wore his shirt to class. President Trump signed an executive order stating that the federal government would only recognize two genders The Massachusetts Family Institute, who is also representing Liam and his family in the case, praised the Executive Order. 'For individuals like Liam Morrison, which have been persecuted for saying exactly what this order proclaims, this development serves as validation,' the Massachusetts Family Institute said in January. However, many have called the order transphobic, with LGBTQ+ advocacy organization GLAAD calling it 'inaccurate,' 'inflammatory,' and 'highly unhinged.'
