Supreme Court rejects West Texas students’ request to hold drag show
The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday rejected an emergency request from students at West Texas A&M University that they be allowed to put on a charity drag show while they challenge the Panhandle school’s ban.
The school’s president cancelled last year’s show as part, he said, of his responsibility to “foster a healthy campus culture and effective educational environment.”
University President Walter Wendler said drag shows “stereotype women in cartoon-like extremes for the amusement of others and discriminate against womanhood.”
While the students are litigating that decision, they asked the court to rule that they could hold this year’s planned show.
The justices denied the request without comment.
In November, the Supreme Court denied a request by Florida officials to let the state enforce a law restricting drag shows.
But Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in a statement partly joined by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, stressed in that case that the court was not dealing with the First Amendment questions but rather the more procedural issues of how the lower courts handled that case.
2 sides to debate over campus speech
Drag shows have joined the front line of America’s culture wars in recent years. Republican lawmakers in multiple states have tried to restrict drag shows. A federal judge last year said a Texas law seeking to limit drag performances in the state is unconstitutional.
But the case is also another side of the roiling debate over campus speech that has included challenges from the right about whether efforts to confront bias on campus intimidate students who want to speak their mind.
In this challenge from the left, the West Texas A&M students argued that the “judicial safety net broke down” because the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is moving too slowly on their challenge to the university’s decision and on a request to put that decision on hold while it’s being litigated.
“This would be bad enough if the problem were confined to having the president of one small public university in the Texas Panhandle defy what he knows to be the First Amendment’s command. But it isn’t,” the students’ lawyers told the Supreme Court. “Public university and college officials nationwide from across the political spectrum are appointing themselves censors-inchief, separating what they consider `good’ from `bad’ expression on their campuses.”
The university in Canyon agreed that the case might raise important First Amendment questions. But the issue is not of such immediate national importance that the court needs to weigh in now, the school told the court.
Are drag shows denigrating and demeaning to women?
“This would be bad enough if the problem were confined to having the president of one small public university in the Texas Panhandle defy what he knows to be the First Amendment’s command. But it isn’t.”
West Texas A&M students’ lawyers Told to the U.S. Supreme Court
Spectrum WT, a student organization, wants to hold the drag show to raise money for the Trevor Project, which focuses on suicide prevention for LGBTQ+ young people.
Wendler, the school’s president, said it is not possible to put on a drag show without denigrating and demeaning women.
“I will not appear to condone the diminishment of any group at the expense of impertinent gestures toward another group for any reason, even when the law of the land appears to require it,” he wrote. “Supporting the Trevor Project is a good idea. My recommendation is to skip the show and send the dough.”
An attorney for the students said the Supreme Court’s decision is disappointing but the fight will continue when the 5th Circuit hears oral arguments in the challenge next month.
“The show is not over,” said JT Morrison, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.