Pubdate: Tue, 26 Jun 2007
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Copyright: 2007 Los Angeles Times
Contact:  http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Bookmark: 
http://www.mapinc.org/topics/Bong+Hits+4+Jesus 
(Bong Hits 4 Jesus)

THE WRONG LESSON

In the 'BONG HiTS 4 JESUS' case, the Supreme Court muddles the 
message of an important precedent.

ON THE SAME DAY it expanded free speech in the political process, the 
Supreme Court needlessly narrowed it in the nation's public schools.

In upholding the suspension of an Alaska high school student for 
unfurling a banner declaring "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS" during a field trip, 
a 5-4 majority drained the life out of one of the court's landmark 
pronouncements: that children do not "shed their constitutional 
rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate."

The quotation comes from Tinker vs. Des Moines School District, a 
1969 case in which the court overturned the suspension of students 
who had defied school officials by wearing black armbands to protest 
the Vietnam War. Then as now, the notion that schoolchildren would 
have opinions, let alone the constitutional right to express them, 
was controversial.

But Tinker wasn't the educational equivalent of putting the asylum in 
the charge of the inmates. Justice Abe Fortas' majority opinion made 
it clear that school administrators could limit student speech when 
it would "substantially interfere with the work of the school or 
impinge upon the rights of other students." They could not squelch 
speech simply to avoid "the discomfort and unpleasantness that always 
accompany an unpopular viewpoint."

"Discomfort and unpleasantness" is a fair description of what school 
administrators in Des Moines tried to prevent by warning 15-year-old 
John Tinker and his 13-year-old sister Mary Beth against wearing 
antiwar armbands.

It also describes the result of a decision by 18-year-old Joseph 
Frederick to hold his bong banner before TV cameras in 2002 as the 
Olympic torch relay passed through Juneau. As if realizing that this 
was hard to square with the Tinker ruling, Chief Justice John G. 
Roberts Jr. emphasized another school-speech precedent: a 1986 case 
in which the court upheld the suspension of a student who used sexual 
imagery in a speech at a school assembly. But the bong banner wasn't 
obscene; it was inane.

In ruling against Frederick, the court has muddled the teaching of 
Tinker and has made it easier for hypercautious school officials to 
clamp down on a wide range of student speech, some of which will be 
more serious than the bong banner. The only saving grace is that two 
of the justices who signed Roberts' opinion, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and 
Anthony M. Kennedy, filed a separate opinion in which they said the 
decision "provides no support for any restriction of speech that can 
plausibly be interpreted as commenting on any political or social 
issue" -- including "the wisdom of the war on drugs." Alito and 
Kennedy would have been truer to their concern for free speech if 
they had dissented outright, as did Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth 
Bader Ginsburg and David H. Souter.

Stevens should have the last word on this unfortunate U-turn by the court.

He noted that Roberts, in his majority opinion in the issue-ads 
ruling, had said that when the 1st Amendment is involved, "the tie 
goes to the speaker." Turning the chief justice's words against him, 
Stevens argued that in the bong banner case, "the tie would have to 
go to Frederick's speech, not to the principal's strained reading of 
his quixotic message." 
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MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman