Student’s Trial Against Servite High Begins : Courts: He says his rights were violated when he wasn’t readmitted after using ‘femi-Nazi’ in speech. School officials say problem was his refusal to accept counseling.

He had complained about the cafeteria food, called for ceiling repairs and criticized a teacher who would patrol the halls of his private Catholic high school looking for untucked shirts.

But Michael Carter testified Friday it was a reference in his campaign speech for school vice president about some female teachers using “femi-Nazi” tactics that brought calls for his “head on a platter.”

“And what do we want done about the femi-Nazi tactics used by some of the female teachers?” Carter asked, reciting from his campaign speech during the opening of his trial Friday against Servite High School. “The discrimination against us men must stop. As if we did not have enough to worry about with our studies.”

In a headline-making case that has even drawn the attention of conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who is credited with coining the “femi-Nazi” phrase, the Huntington Beach teen-ager is alleging that school administrators violated his free speech rights and wrongly denied his readmission when he refused to undergo “psychological” counseling.

Servite officials deny any wrongdoing and say Carter was not asked to attend counseling because of the “femi-Nazi” reference, but for a pattern of behavior teachers found offensive and disrespectful.

“Mr. Carter exhibited a problem with and a disrespect for authority, both before this speech and after the speech,” Servite attorney Jeffrey Smith told Orange County Superior Court Judge Frederick Horn, who will decide if Carter should be readmitted to the school for his senior year.

Carter, now 18, acknowledged during his testimony that he’d been disciplined a few times during his first year at the school as a sophomore, including one time when he flicked a dime into a teacher’s pocket. But he denied any problems his junior year and said the only order for counseling came after he made the “femi-Nazi” reference in May, 1993.

His attorney, John Howard with the Los Angeles-based Individual Rights Foundation, argued that the case is really about a violation of Carter’s First Amendment rights.

“This is about the arrogance of a school and its intolerance to harmless speech that is does not like,” Howard said in a news release announcing the trial. “Americans won’t tolerate restrictions on their speech. Students do not forfeit their free speech rights when they step onto campus, and this case will prove it.”

Howard said Carter is suing under a relatively recent state education law that gives public and private school students the same free speech rights on campus as well as off campus.

But Servite officials denied the case has anything to do with the First Amendment and said it really comes down to the choice Carter and his mother made to refuse counseling. Smith said the request was an appropriate way for officials to talk with Carter about his behavior.

Howard, however, said Carter and his mother objected to the counseling because it “intrudes on family and the private life of individuals.”

Despite the legal dispute, Carter, who graduated last June from a public high school and is currently taking classes at Orange Coast College, said he wants to return to Servite. A diploma from the school would help him gain admission to a Catholic university, where he’d like to study to become a doctor, he said. It’s also a matter of principle, one he said he hopes would “send a message that you can’t be doing this to people.”

Testimony in the trial continues next week.