What kind of a parent thinks a student has a hard-and-fast right to wear a T-shirt to school proclaiming "Obama - A terrorist's best friend"?

A self-righteous one, evidently. Someone who puts his own political fixations ahead of the quality of the educational environment at his own kid's school.

According to 11-year-old Daxx Dalton, his dad came up with the T-shirt slogan that helped get Daxx suspended by Aurora schools, and was even responsible for much of the amateurish lettering.

Now that's the way to cultivate an atmosphere in which students are able to concentrate on the subjects at hand: Promote political strife in the classroom!

It's been nearly 40 years since the U.S. Supreme Court issued its vague but mostly common-sense ruling that students' speech at school could be restricted if it impinged "upon the rights of other students" or created "substantial disruption of or material interference with school activities."

An inflammatory T-shirt is disruptive. Usually deliberately so. And if school officials are not allowed to establish an atmosphere that minimizes deliberate provocations, how can they possibly succeed?

Aurora contends - in what comes close to a hair-splitting exercise - that it suspended Daxx for the disruption his T-shirt provoked and not for the shirt's political content. Yet why should it tolerate a T-shirt calling a presidential candidate a terrorist given the likely reaction?

Minors don't always enjoy the same level of civil and constitutional rights as an adult. That is particularly true in a setting where attendance is required by law and students cannot simply walk away from in-your-face obnoxiousness, as they might in another public venue.

Yet hardly a year goes by in which some kid somewhere doesn't push the limits with a T-shirt insisting, for example, that President Bush is an "international terrorist" (Dearborn, Mich., 2003) or, say, that "homosexuality is shameful" (San Diego, 2004), with the result being a legal battle.

In the latter case, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals split 2-1 in supporting the school's right to ban the anti-gay shirt. But even Judge Alex Kozinski, who wrote a strong dissent, admitted that the implications of his position could be troubling.

"There is surely something to the notion that a Jewish student might not be able to devote his full attention to school activities if the fellow in the seat next to him is wearing a T-shirt with the message 'Hitler Had the Right Idea' in front and 'Let's Finish the Job!' on the back," Kozinski wrote.

If Aurora school officials are truly determined to insist that they didn't suspend Daxx Dalton for refusing to take off or cover his T-shirt, maybe they should ask themselves, per Kozinski's example, how they would react to a student wearing a shirt that read "Hitler Had the Right Idea."

You want to wear an obnoxious T-shirt? By all means. Do it. In a park, on the sidewalk - on a state college campus, for that matter. But not in the sixth grade at a public school.

Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.