Sixteen-year-old Steven McDonaldson, who attends Waynesboro High School, has been twice expelled from class and lectured by the principal — for wearing a t-shirt bearing the Confederate battle flag. As the News Virginian reports:
The school dress code prohibits clothes that “reflect adversely upon persons because of their race, sex, color, creed, national origin, or ancestry,” and administrators have deemed the controversial Civil War battle flag to fall into that category.
This is not a case, as in South Carolina or Georgia, where controversies erupted over the state-sanctioned display of the flag on state property. This is a case of an individual wearing a t-shirt in school. Leave the kid alone. He wasn’t misbehaving in any way. Isn’t it time we all stopped hyper-ventilating over this sort of thing?
