School violated their First Amendment rights: District bound by court to allow peaceful sideline protest.
We seem to be closing NH cases this week. On Nov. 4th, we reported on the settlement of a viewpoint discrimination case involving some ‘Grok ‘ authors and the City of Nashua. Today, the Institute for Speech announced that the Bow Pink ‘xx’ wristband case had also been settled.
After more than two years of litigation by the Institute for Free Speech, the Bow School District has agreed to a judgment declaring that it violated the plaintiffs’ rights by barring them from wearing the wristbands at the game. U.S. District Judge Steven J. McAuliffe entered the stipulated declaratory judgment on November 5, 2026 as part of a settlement ending Fellers, et al., v. Kelley, et al. The Institute brought the lawsuit on behalf of Kyle Fellers, Anthony “Andy” Foote, Nicole Foote, and Eldon Rash. The settlement also provides $275,000 in attorneys’ fees and costs.
Parents wore pink wristbands with ‘XX’ on them in black Sharpie in silent protest of a boy playing on the opposing girls’ team. The story got national attention, but Bow maintained the ban right up until the declaratory judgment against the Superintendent and the School District.
The judgment declares that the plaintiffs “have a First Amendment right to silently wear pink wristbands bearing the XX symbol on the sidelines, in the spectator’s area, or in the parking lot of any Bow District sporting event.” It binds the district and its Board of Education, and it remains in effect even if the district amends its policies. The court will retain jurisdiction to enforce both the judgment and the settlement.
It’s a big win for parents and the First Amendment and, again, like the flagpole in Nashua, completely avoidable. The First Amendment violation was clear as Vodka. These were both blatant viewpoint discrimination cases, and you can’t convince me they didn’t know that when they did it. Which is the downside.
The Insurers will pay the legal fees, but no one in elected or appointed office will suffer for the discrimination, public abuse, wasted time, negative publicity, or the actual expense. As in Nashua, Bow paid for its legal team to defend its clients’ acts of discrimination and then paid again for the defense to prove it, which they did.
None of that had to happen, but then it did. Woke elected officials and administrators made it necessary, and these cases don’t even begin to rise to the sorts of abuse dealt to Jack Phillips and Masterpiece Cake Shop in Colorado, where the State enabled it, then defended it, and the courts sustained the abuses all the way to the US Supreme Court.
These New Hampshire cases thankfully went no further than the Circuit Courts, but the fact that judges at the local or district level aided and abetted discrimination remains a problem we the people face daily.
The organs of our government, including schools and city halls, continue to use the back of insurance and taxpayer dollars to violate our Constitutionally protected rights. Until a majority of Americans understand this and internalize the threat it represents to them, we’ll continue to endure wave elections like the one this past Tuesday.
