A man carrying signs declaring women to be property showed up outside an Ohio high school. By dismissal time, a group of mothers was waiting with signs of its own.
A man stationed himself near an entrance to Oak Hills High School in Green Township, Ohio, Tuesday morning with a message practically designed to make people stop and stare.
One side of his sign disparaged women and invoked slavery while listing women alongside animals, cars and land as forms of “property,” FOX19 reported.
And Oak Hills apparently wasn’t his only stop.
Green Township Police told the station the man had also been seen at Walnut Hills High School and Taylor High School.
By the time Oak Hills students were headed home, however, somebody else was waiting outside.
A group of mothers had organized a counter-protest.
Students Saw The Signs On Their Way Into School
Nicki Niehaus, who organized the response, told FOX19 her niece attends Oak Hills and had messaged family members that morning after encountering the demonstration.
“It just did not sit well with me that that’s what our young women are seeing when they’re heading into their place of learning,” Niehaus told the station.
So the parents came back with their own signs.
Amanda Bernstein, whose daughter attends Oak Hills, described the man’s message as “asinine.”
Another parent, Estephanie Linares, brought a sign written in Spanish that she characterized to FOX19 as a less-than-polite way of telling the man to go away.
Linares has four sons.
“I have four boys so it’s extremely important for me to raise boys that love and protect women and treasure women,” she said.
The counter-protesters told FOX19 they wanted girls leaving school that afternoon to see a different message from the one that had greeted them that morning.
Why Wasn’t He Arrested?
That question dominated some of the reaction to footage of the protest.
“He should have been arrested,” one YouTube commenter wrote.
Another asked how an adult could stand outside a high school with messages aimed at girls without ending up in jail.
The answer starts with an uncomfortable feature of the First Amendment: Speech does not lose constitutional protection simply because almost everybody hearing it considers the message vile.
Public streets and sidewalks have traditionally received some of the strongest First Amendment protection.
The U.S. Supreme Court confronted an especially stark example in Snyder v. Phelps, a 2011 case involving members of Westboro Baptist Church who carried inflammatory signs near the funeral of a Marine killed in Iraq.
The Court ruled that the First Amendment protected the church from civil liability under the circumstances, stressing that speech on matters of public concern in a public place receives special protection.
As the Supreme Court’s opinion explained, speech cannot be restricted merely because its message is upsetting or inspires contempt.
That does not create a universal right to do anything while holding a sign.
Trespassing, blocking access, making legally actionable threats or engaging in other unlawful conduct can raise entirely different issues. Governments can also impose certain content-neutral rules governing when, where and how expressive activity takes place.
FOX19’s report does not say the Oak Hills demonstrator was arrested or charged, nor does it report that police accused him of threatening, touching or assaulting students.
So the fact that people found his signs revolting is not, by itself, enough to establish that police had grounds to haul him away.
The Counter-Protest Used The Same Freedom
The mothers outside Oak Hills didn’t need the government’s agreement before responding to the message.
They used the same basic instrument the man with the signs was using: more speech.
That is what made the afternoon scene substantially different from the morning one.
The first demonstration was no longer the only message students encountered outside the school.
Parents had put another one beside it.
Some online commenters wanted officials to identify the man, investigate his family, search his computer or reveal where he lived. Others labeled him a predator or suggested he posed a physical danger to students.
Those are allegations the available reporting does not establish.
What police did establish, according to FOX19, was unusual enough on its own: the same man had reportedly been seen with his signs around three Cincinnati-area high schools.
At Oak Hills, parents decided that was enough reason to show up too.
The School District Stayed Out Of It
Oak Hills Local School District did not issue a public condemnation in the FOX19 report.
The station said it contacted the district Tuesday afternoon seeking a statement and was told the district did not want to comment.
That silence drew plenty of anger online, including from viewers who interpreted the absence of a statement as a failure by school officials to defend students.
But there is a gap between knowing the district declined an interview and knowing why.
The available reporting does not establish its reasoning, so there isn’t much legitimate mileage in filling in the blank for them.
The parents, meanwhile, had already made their position considerably less ambiguous.
A man arrived outside the school with signs declaring women property.
By dismissal, moms were standing there with signs telling students otherwise.