The Morrison family, whose son Liam Morrison was prohibited from wearing a shirt to his school, is preparing to file a lawsuit against Nichols Middle School (NMS) for allegedly violating their son Liam’s First Amendment rights. The shirt at issue said, “There are only two genders.”
News on the Morrison family’s potential suit came after attorneys for NMS told the organization representing Liam and his family, the Massachusetts Family Institute (MFI), that it would continue prohibiting Liam from wearing the shirt to school.
In response to being told he couldn’t wear the “There are only two genders” shirt, Liam wore a “There are censored genders” T-shirt in response. However, that shirt about censorship was censored as well, as Liam was told to take it off almost immediately after school started.
Speaking to Fox News Digital, Liam said, “So what happened is very, very shortly after I arrived, I was actually a bit early, is just as the school was opening up– it didn’t really take long for someone to walk into my homeroom and [someone] to tell me, ‘Hey, I need you to follow me.’ And knowing the shirt I was wearing and even though how different it was, I figured out that they would probably want me to come to the principal’s office. And after I had followed them, I went to the room that they told me to, and I already took my shirt off because I knew that that’s what they were going to ask me to do.”
Liam also encouraged others to fight for their beliefs, saying, “Always fight for what you believe in and well, never let anyone stop you from believing really. To be honest, in the place that we live, or in the time that we live, there are a lot of people that try and make it so that you’re not allowed to believe what you can. But, it’s being taken away from us. And being able to speak up not just about your own, being able to voice your opinion, but for everybody else.”
Sam Whiting, a staff attorney for MFI, told Fox News Digital that he expects a response within a month or so and that, if it goes to court, “We believe that we’re going to get a win on this. I mean, I really can’t think of a better fact pattern to vindicate a student’s First Amendment rights.”
Continuing, Whiting said, “Liam did everything correct in this situation. He hasn’t disrupted anything. He hasn’t harassed anyone. And yet they’re still censoring him just because they don’t like what his shirt had to say. And that’s made even more obvious by the fact that they made him take off a censored version of the shirt. It didn’t even say anything about gender. It just made a statement about censorship. And because Liam was wearing it, they made him take it off again.”
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He then added, “Liam has the same right in school to discuss that as he would anywhere else, as long as he’s not causing a disruption that, you know, affects the operations of the school.”
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video