A Texas high school senior is fighting for his right to Free Speech after his public school shut down his pro-life club.
The odds were already stacked against Diego Salinas, a student at Sonia Sotomayor High School, who tried to establish the “Sotomayor Students for Life” branch of its national organization, this Fall.
For one thing, his school is named after a leftist member of the Supreme Court, who says the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade put her in a state of “despair.”
In an interview with CBS affiliate KENS5, Salinas claims he’s “done everything correctly” and has “gone through the process,” waiting several months for his school’s approval as an official club.
But the trouble began when Salinas started an Instagram page that had his club’s title in the handle.
“Once that Instagram [account] kind of got popular, kids started finding out about the club,” he told KENS5.
The Northside Independent School District complained that he couldn’t use “Sotomayor” in his handle, because it would falsely “imply to students or the public that a “non curriculum- related student group,” is “school-sponsored.”
Salinas argues that the district allows other groups to use the school’s name without any issues.
Instead of merely having him change his club’s username, Sotamayor’s assistant principal forced him to delete the account altogether in front of her.
That wasn’t enough.
“After the Instagram account was deleted, they called me into the office and said because the club was preventing education from moving forward and because it was creating an uproar in the school, they were temporarily suspending my club,” Salinas told KENS5. He claims the assistant principal also called his chapter a “safety hazard.”
It turns out, the school was pressured by an army of mad mommies who called the district to complain. But with the help of lawyers representing Students For Life America, Salinas is fighting back.
In a letter demanding the high school reinstate the club, its national lawyers call it a “Constitutional violation to silence the speaker when his dissenters are causing problems.”
“Moreover,” the letter continued, “Sotomayor subjected Diego” and his club to “additional unwarranted censorship, and imposed on them rules that do not apply to other clubs and have no support in school policies or the law.”
The school ignored the letter, despite being given until October 28 to respond. In an update to CatholicVote, Salinas told the outlet that he’s nearing litigation.
