The wingnut blogosphere is fuming and hissing with outrage over this story today: Students Kicked Off Campus for Wearing American Flag Tees.

What? They were kicked out of school just for wearing US flag clothing? Outrage!

But as usual with these trumped up nontroversies, there’s a bit more to the story. Is it possible they weren’t just expressing their patriotism, but were in fact using the American flag as a deliberate insult to Hispanic students? Why yes, it is.

On any other day at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, Daniel Galli and his four friends would not even be noticed for wearing T-shirts with the American flag. But Cinco de Mayo is not any typical day especially on a campus with a large Mexican American student population.

Galli says he and his friends were sitting at a table during brunch break when the vice principal asked two of the boys to remove American flag bandannas that they wearing on their heads and for the others to turn their American flag T-shirts inside out. When they refused, the boys were ordered to go to the principal’s office.

“They said we could wear it on any other day,” Daniel Galli said, “but today is sensitive to Mexican-Americans because it’s supposed to be their holiday so we were not allowed to wear it today.”

The boys said the administrators called their T-shirts “incendiary” that would lead to fights on campus.

What school principal wouldn’t have done the same thing? Don’t they have a responsibility to maintain order in school? And if so, isn’t it blindingly obvious that they need to take action when students do things that are designed to create conflict and bad feelings?

How would these bloggers feel if a group of Mexican students came to a school event wearing Mexican flags on July 4th? You can just imagine their overheated reactions. The hypocrisy reeks.