The ACLU has filed a lawsuit against a North Carolina school board after it shut down a student-led trivia game about prominent LGBTQ+ figures, claiming the game was “indecent.”

The suit, filed Wednesday on behalf of one of the student organizers in the U.S. Court for the Western District of North Carolina, alleges the Cleveland County Schools Board of Education violated students’ rights to free speech, freedom of association and equal access to school resources, the Charlotte Observer reported.

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“It is longstanding law that students do not shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate, and school officials cannot prohibit student speech simply because they disagree with its message or find it uncomfortable,” said Ivy Johnson, staff attorney for the ACLU of North Carolina, in a statement.

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“Acknowledging that LGBTQ+ people exist is not inappropriate or indecent,” she added.

The game, planned for the student-led Activism Club at Shelby High, asked “students to identify people like Harvey Milk, Lady Gaga, and Ellen DeGeneres, as well as pieces of popular media that feature LGBTQ+ characters or actors,” according to the lawsuit.

Previous games addressed topics including the Black Lives Matter movement, the war in Gaza, Women’s History Month, suicide and breast cancer awareness.

Participation in the club is voluntary, and students don’t receive grades or academic credit for participation, according to the lawsuit.

Prior to banning the LGBTQ+ version of the game, the school board had never prohibited any of the club’s activities, but did require parental permission for participation in some discussions based on North Carolina’s Parent’s Bill of Rights.

That legislation, passed in 2023, prohibits instruction on gender identity and sexuality in grades K-4 in the state. The law does not apply to high schools.

Students pitched the trivia game to the club’s faculty advisor last spring and it was approved. But when Shelby High’s principal sought the district superintendent’s approval, he balked, the lawsuit states. The game was prohibited again when students revisited the idea in the fall.

An attorney for school district responded to a demand letter from the ACLU on the student’s behalf in January, saying the game was deemed “indecent based on community standards, inappropriate for display considering the age of students, and encouraged the violation of school regulations.”

The reply cited a portion of the trivia game mentioning an individual “expressing her bisexuality” and song lyrics referencing cigarettes.

In 2023, North Carolina’s Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed the Parents Bill of Rights (S.B. 49) along with two other anti-LGBTQ+ bills, calling them “a triple threat of political culture wars.” He accused Republicans of “scheming for the next election” at the expense of vulnerable children.

Cooper called out S.B. 49 for hampering “the important and sometimes lifesaving role of educators as trusted advisers when students have nowhere else to turn.”

Soon after, the state’s Republican-led legislature overrode all three vetoes.

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