Supreme Court stays out of dispute over drag show at Texas University

Friday the Supreme Court a request rejected of an LGBTQ student group at a public university in Texas to allow a drag show to be organized on campus, despite the objections of the university’s president, who had refused to allow it.

In a emergency applicationthe students said the president’s action violated the First Amendment.

As is the court’s practice when deciding emergency matters, the judges’ brief order did not provide reasons. There were no identified dissenting opinions.

Drag shows are increasingly a target of the right, with some Republican-led states, including Florida and Tennessee, seeking to limit performances.

The student group Spectrum WT first tried to sponsor the drag show, a charity event to raise money for suicide prevention, in March 2023. Walter Wendler, the president of West Texas A&M University, canceled it, citing the Bible and other religious texts. .

Drag shows, he said, “are mocking, divisive and demoralizing misogyny.”

He added: “An innocent drag show? Not possible.” Mr. Wendler went on to say that he would not approve such shows “even if the law of the land appears to require it.”

The student group and two of its members filed a lawsuit, saying the president’s action constituted prior government restraint and discrimination based on viewpoints, both violations of the First Amendment. The group held the 2023 event off campus, began planning the 2024 show, and sought a court order to allow that show to take place on campus.

In September, Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk of the federal district court in Amarillo has denied the students’ request for a preliminary injunction. He said that “it has not been clearly established that all drag shows are inherently expressive,” a claim that is in tension with First Amendment precedents. protect theatrical performances.

More generally: the Supreme Court said that it is “a fundamental First Amendment principle” that “speech shall not be prohibited on the grounds that it expresses ideas that are offensive.”

Judge Kacsmaryk suggested that the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence had strayed from what he believed was the proper mode of constitutional interpretation, one that was based on “text, history and tradition” and that conflicted with the more categorical protection of the freedom of opinion that he believed had emerged. at the end of the 20th century.

Judge Kacsmaryk, appointed by President Donald J. Trump, has made other notable rulings. In 2023, he gained attention for overruling the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, a ruling that the Supreme Court put on hold and will hear arguments this month.

In 2021, the judge ruled that the Biden administration couldn’t withdraw a Trump-era immigration program that forced some asylum seekers at the southwest border to wait for approval in Mexico. The Supreme Court disagreed.

In the drag show case, the students asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to expedite their appeal of Judge Kacsmaryk’s decision, but the court refused and scheduled oral arguments for the week of April 29, after the scheduled appearance.

The students then submitted an application emergency application asking the Supreme Court to intervene. The court had previously dealt with drag shows in November when it refused to revive them a Florida law which banned children from what the law called “live adult performances.”

Mr. Wendler, represented by Ken Paxton, Attorney General of Texas, the justices urged to reject the application because the students had been too slow in seeking legal assistance.

Mr Wendler added that the dispute was not worth the court’s attention. “This case concerns whether a fundraiser for a campus organization at a West Texas university can be held on campus or should be held down the street,” his letter said.

The First Amendment, he continued, had little to say on the issue, since drag shows are not “pure speech,” but rather conduct that can be regulated. “President Wendler has reasonably prohibited the expenditure of University resources on offensive and obscene conduct,” his letter said.

The students in the Texas case are represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, who has a special interest in protecting free speech on campus. In the student group’s emergency application, the foundation’s lawyers wrote that the banning of the drag show was not an isolated incident.

“This would be bad enough if the problem were limited to the president of a small public university in the Texas Panhandle defying the First Amendment warrant,” the filing said. ‘But that’s not true. Officials at public universities and colleges across the political spectrum are appointing themselves chief censors, separating what they consider ‘good’ from ‘bad’ speech on their campuses.”