Speshul Little Snowflakes, Aren't They All

It's been a while since I was 12 (23 years, to be exact), but I do recall the Great Band Shirt Wars of '87. If you were alive and aware in 1987, you're already laughing. If not, pull up a chair while I tell you a story, whippersnapper.

1987 was a glorious time, filled with big, frizzy hair, tight acid washed jeans, tube tops and neon lipstick worn unironically. It was also the Age of Metal.* Every teenager listened to ridiculous bands like Iron Maiden and Napalm Death, and the T-Shirts were epic. If your T-shirt didn't include offensive language and offensive imagery of (a) violated women, or (b) death, or (c) women violated by death, you were a loser. (Back then, we called losers "nerds". Times have changed.)

So, basically every junior high and high school student wore these shirts to school, and the school dealt with it one of three ways: you had to turn the shirt inside out, you had to cover the offensive language with masking tape, or you could go home. Every single morning, the school staff wasted at least 30 minutes of their time policing T-shirts. Looking back on it all, the entire teenage population of the 80s owes their teachers flowers and sincere apology for being such jackasses.

I bring this up so you'll know exactly how I feel about this bullshit:

Michelle Ramirez was pulled out of class at North Kirkwood Middle School in Kirkwood, Mo., on Wednesday for wearing a T-shirt that read, “JESUS, HE SCARES THE HELL OUT OF YOU.”

Administrators claimed that under the Kirkwood dress code policy, the use of the word “hell” was inappropriate and vulgar, according to the principal and school district officer Ginger Fletcher.

Reported by FOX 2 news, Fletcher stated, “Outside the school environment, it might be fine. Anything within the school that… might create a disruption in the school, we’ll ask the student to modify the garment.”

Okay. So the exact same thing that was going on back when I was 12. Except that Fox News didn't report on anyone's Voivod shirt.

While the school considered the use of “hell” a “slang” word that might be offensive to other students, Ramirez and her family all stood by the belief that the word hell denotes a place, not a slang.

“I don’t think it’s a slang word because it’s all capitalized, and even though the ‘HELL’ is a different color, it still means the same thing: That he does scare the hell out of you, that you’re not letting the devil in,” responded Ramirez, who received the shirt from her youth group that specializes in extreme messages to promote their beliefs.

“To us, hell is a place… It’s not… She’s not using it as a slang. So if she’s not using it as a slang, then the shirt should be okay,” commented her mother, Christina Ramirez. [emphasis mine]

Oh, c'mon. So the shirt deliberately seeks to take advantage of "hell" having a few different meanings, one of them somewhat obscene, in order to draw attention, but drawing attention was not the point and she should be allowed to draw attention with questionable language even though everyones else does not have that right.

I'd say to grow up, but her parents have decided that HELL is a religious symbol.

“It’s federal law that you cannot ask a student to remove an emblem, insignia, or garment including a religious emblem,” the Christina Ramirez further explained to FOX.

Honestly. That's just . . . I expect a 12 year old to come up with that sort of logic, but her mother?

And then they decided that HELL is not a protected religious symbol.

Though Ramirez and her family felt a double standard in the school’s position, where other classmates wore shirts with gang insinuations – one shirt even reading, “We kick balls” – she stated that she would not wear the shirt to school again after she and her father read a passage in the Bible on Thursday that said Jesus respected the law of the land.

Aw, poor little speshul snowflakes.

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