Parents of a 9-year-old Mississippi girl are suing Simpson Central School after their daughter was forced to remove her “Jesus loves me” face mask by the Pinola school’s principal. Matthew and Jennifer Booth are seeking “nominal damages” after they claim their daughter Lydia’s rights were violated and she was left feeling singled out from other students.
- School officials say the mask went against policy. While the Booths insist that Lydia should have had the right to wear the mask, the school say that it went against their policy against face masks with religious sayings. Given that this is a public school and not a religious one, they believe their rule is well-founded and intentioned.
- Lydia was given a different mask to wear. While Lydia was made to remove the “Jesus loves me” mask, she wasn’t left without one. Instead, one of the teachers gave her a plain mask to wear instead so that she could still be protected while following the rules.
- They’ve called upon an evangelical group to file the lawsuit. The organization that filed the lawsuit on the Booths’ behalf, the Alliance Defending Freedom, has been declared an anti-LGBTQ+ hate by Southern Poverty Law Center and is said to have ties to Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s latest Supreme Court pick.
- The booths claim that no such rules existed. The school insists that the rule against religious masks was part of their restart plan, with a superintendent properly updating the policy two days after the incident with Lydia. “Masks cannot display political, religious, sexual or any inappropriate symbols, gestures or statements that may be offensive, disruptive, or deemed distractive to the school environment,” it reads.
- They claim other students were wearing inappropriate masks too. The Booths insist that Lydia wore the Jesus mask several times before without incident before she was asked to remove it. They also take umbrage with the fact that other students were wearing Black Lives Matter masks and ones supporting sports teams but weren’t asked to remove them, WBRC reports.
