get a chance to portray themselves as an oppressed minority ? This part is even more bizarre : Conservatives are defending the rights of the students because the story fits into their paranoid narrative of cultural displacement -- where the Mexican flag is supplanting Old Glory , Spanish is drowning out English , the tortilla has bread on the run , and so on and on . This is outrageous , conservatives say , as they blast school administrators by accusing them of overstepping their bounds . Conservatives take this stance , but have spent the better part of the last three decades asserting -- in legal briefs and oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court -- the power of public school administrators to maintain order and prevent disruptive behavior even at the expense of curtailing students ' First Amendment rights . In a classic and clumsy flip-flop , conservatives were against First Amendment rights for public school students on campus before they were in favor of them . You see , conservatives usually do n't give a hoot about whether students have the right to express , on school campuses , their opinion about this or that -- especially
San Diego , California -LRB- CNN -RRB- -- When five students at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill , California , taunted Latino students by wearing T-shirts bearing the American flag on Cinco de Mayo , even though administrators had told students beforehand not to wear flag clothing that day , they caused a ruckus , divided a community and reignited the culture wars . And , it turns out , they were just getting warmed up . The ruckus ensued when Assistant Principal Miguel Rodriguez -- apparently fearing that the boys ' fashion choices might provoke a violent response from Latino students who have developed an emotional attachment to the faux holiday as `` their day '' -- told the youths to either turn their T-shirts inside out or go home . The lads chose the latter , and were , for this act of defiance , magically transformed from bratty kids to defenders of individual freedom and innocent victims of the establishment . Why not ? Everyone else in society plays the victim . Nothing is ever anyone 's fault . Someone else is always to blame . And so why should n't these five young men