CatholicVote filed a friend-of-the-court brief with an appeals court Sept. 18 in support of a girl who sued after her high school suppressed her pro-life club and free speech over flyers it said were “political.”
Student “E.D.” sued in 2021 after Noblesville High School banned her flyers with “Defund Planned Parenthood” messages, citing concerns about the posters being political.
A district court and the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the school district, citing Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier (1988), which allows schools to censor school-sponsored speech.
E.D. argues her flyers were private speech, pointing to Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), which protects private student expression.
CatholicVote supports E.D., arguing that the appeals court misapplied Kuhlmeier and warning that the case could allow schools to censor “political” or controversial student speech.
Both CatholicVote and E.D. are calling for the appeals court to review the case en banc and apply Tinker instead of Kuhlmeier.
In the brief, the CatholicVote Education Fund states that it is “deeply concerned about the First Amendment issues” implicated in the case, E.D. v. Noblesville School District. The brief adds that CatholicVote supports “the right of all students to respectfully participate in nondisruptive expression on school grounds regarding important national and political issues even when—or perhaps especially when—those issues are controversial.”
Case background: School tells student pro-life flyers are ‘political’
The girl, identified as E.D., sued in 2021 after school administrators at Noblesville High School in Indiana told her that she could not hang flyers promoting her pro-life club because the posters featured photos of students holding signs that read “Defund Planned Parenthood.” According to court documents, E.D. was told “posters cannot contain any content that is political or that could disrupt the school environment.” She was asked to create a flyer that only stated the name of her club, the meeting time, and the location.
E.D. later met with the dean of students and asked him about the flyer policy. Her mother attended that meeting, and shortly afterward, the principal suspended the club for an “attempt at insubordination led by an outside adult advocating with the student,” saying he was concerned that the club was no longer 100% student-led. The principal reinstated the club in 2022 after E.D. reapplied.
In their suit against the Noblesville School District, E.D. and her parents argued that the school district violated her free speech and association rights and the Equal Access Act. A district court sided with the school, prompting E.D. to appeal. In August 2025, a panel of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit upheld the district court’s ruling. E.D., backed by CatholicVote, now asks the appeals court to reconsider the case en banc, before the full court.
Appeals court: School may govern school-sponsored speech
The appeals court’s ruling cited several cases as precedent but mainly held up a landmark Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) ruling from 1988 as the governing standard for E.D.’s case. SCOTUS had ruled in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier that a school could censor student speech that others “might reasonably perceive to bear the imprimatur of the school.” That case had centered on school officials’ decision to remove two articles from a school-sponsored student newspaper, one that discussed student pregnancy and one on the impact of divorce on students.
The court judged that E.D.’s flyers, which would have been hung on school walls and been signed with the initials of a faculty member, could be perceived as being endorsed by the school. The court also found that the school’s actions were “reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns,” as stipulated by Kuhlmeier, and ruled that the school did not target the pro-life club because of its viewpoint.
E.D. and her parents counter that Kuhlmeier does not apply to her case because the flyers were an expression of her private speech, rather than school-sponsored speech. They claim that another landmark SCOTUS case from 1969, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, should guide the ruling for the suit. In Tinker, SCOTUS ruled that students at a public school could wear black armbands to school in protest of the Vietnam War, holding that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”
E.D. and her parents also point to a similar case, Jacob v. Sonnabend, that the Seventh Circuit decided in 2022. In that case, two boys sued for the right to wear shirts that depicted guns to school, expressing their support for the Second Amendment. The court applied Tinker and remanded the case to a lower court for further proceedings, ruling that the lower court had “mistakenly applied Kuhlmeier and speech-forum analysis.”
CatholicVote contends ruling restricts E.D.’s private speech
In the amicus brief, CatholicVote argued that the Seventh Circuit panel that ruled against E.D. in August issued an opinion that “directly conflicts with Hazelwood Sch. Dist. v. Kuhlmeier, which applies only if the student expression at issue is ‘school-sponsored’ and, therefore, ‘part of the school curriculum.’”
“It is undisputed that the flyers at issue in this case were the private expression of Noblesville Students for Life (‘NSFL’), a student-run club at Noblesville High School (‘NHS’), and not part of a school-sponsored expressive activity,” CatholicVote added, urging the full court to apply Tinker as the legal standard.
CatholicVote also raised concerns that the panel’s ruling expands Kuhlmeier’s scope and narrows Tinker’s, which permits the school “to ban such student-sponsored speech whenever school officials view it as ‘disruptive’ or ‘political.’”
In response to the court’s reasoning that others might mistakenly believe the flyer’s message was endorsed by the school, CatholicVote said that the court’s misapplication of Kuhlmeier allows the school to “leverage” the possibility of erroneous attribution to restrict students’ speech. CatholicVote also cited two other SCOTUS cases, Shurtleff v. City of Boston (2022) and Capitol Square Review and Advisory Board v. Pinette (1995), which prevent censoring speech simply because others might attribute it to the government.