Good thing that school decision last week isn’t going to have an impact on political speech:
Putting its recent ruling on student speech into practice, the Supreme Court on Friday rejected a school district’s appeal of a ruling that it violated a student’s rights by censoring his anti-Bush T-shirt.
A seventh-grader from Vermont was suspended for wearing a shirt that bore images of cocaine and a martini glass—but also had messages calling President Bush a lying drunk driver who abused cocaine and marijuana, and the “chicken-hawk-in-chief” who was engaged in a “world domination tour.”After his suspension, Zachary Guiles returned to school with duct tape covering the offending images.
Williamstown Middle School Principal Kathleen Morris-Kortz said the images violated the school dress code, which prohibits clothing that promotes the use of drugs or alcohol.
An appeals court said the school had no right to censor any part of the shirt.
On Monday, the court said schools could regulate student expression if it advocated illegal drug use. Justice Samuel Alito cautioned that schools could not censor political speech.
Because calling your President a drunken coked up loser is advocating drugs.
Queue the 50 ‘liberals’ who cheered the decision last week in the comments section of this thread as ‘the right thing for the kids.’
I am a total idiot- I read the post wrong- the Supremes protected this speech, so maybe I should just shut up and calm down already.
BTW- for long-time readers who might be keeping track, this keeps me at about a perfect 0 for 692 in interpreting court decisions.
chopper
sure doesn’t sound like political speech to me. maybe if the shirt had clinton on it, then maybe it’d be protected speech.
rachel
Ah! So the rulling was the start down a slippery slope after all?
Anonymous Jim
He should have worn a shirt that said “this is your brain” with a picture of the brain and the back said “this is your brain on drugs” with a picture of Bush. Pretty clearly anti-drug.
ThymeZone
Students in a middle school have no right to “free speech.” Without the power to tell kids to shut up, no k-12 school could function.
ONce again, though, we’ll see nonsense to the contrary, just in case anyone forgets why a lot of people can never take liberalism seriously.
demimondian
Some of us are liberals, not libertarians, John. There’s a difference.
Chad N. Freude
Am I missing something?
This says that the school district lost a student censorship case and the SC is refusing to hear the district’s appeal:
Am I misunderstanding John’s comment?
Ted
Well, at least SCOTUS sided with the kid in this case. Surprising though, considering the precedent they just set with the Bong hits case.
demimondian
Interestingly, this decision affects me most directly, as I have an (now ex-) high school senior in my household. (Congrats on graduating, hemi!) If he hadn’t already graduated a couple of days earlier, he was going to get a “bong hits 4 -Jesus- Free Speech” t-shirt made up to wear to school the next day.
The consensus view here in the Demi-bunker was more of “a plague on both your houses” — the kids was tweaking the school administration as a prank, not as a grand staement of political principle. The administration should have simply ignored him, but didn’t. Having made a battle of it, the administration was, technically, right in this instance, but that it was stupid to force the issue in the first place.
demimondian
For clarity “this instance” refers to the bong hits case, not the Vermont case. The Supes, you’ll notice, sat the school district down hard there, as they should have.
Rome Again
True. How many people would disagree with this statement, I wonder?
Rome Again
Well, at least you’re not pretending to be a law professor.
Chad N. Freude
We seem to have wandered into the Wonderful World of Sweeping Generalizationse, and as we all know, all generalizations are false. The appropriateness of telling a kid to shut up is a function of whether the kid is actually causing a disruption. Telling a kid to shut up in a class discussion where differences of opinion are being expressed is BAD. Telling a kid to shut up if his remarks trigger a fight on school grounds is GOOD. Suspending a kid for wearing a provocative shirt when no disruption occurs as a result is way out of bounds, regardless of the SC’s (i.e., Roberts’s) tortured parsing of the meaning of the provocative words.
Chad N. Freude
I guess I didn’t misread John. Literacy rocks!
jake
I read the original post and thought one of us needed more coffee.
No worries. We dirty hippies are forgiving that way.
Ted
Telling a kid to shut up in class is perfectly acceptable to stop a disturbance. But words on a T-shirt expressing a political opinion do not interfere with classroom instruction.
demimondian
Well, I wouldn’t agree with it completely. The schools have extra power to control speech *for the purpose of protecting students from one another*. That *is* a reason which passes all the standard “clear government interest” tests. The schools do not have the right to restrict all speech, as some types of speech, even if they might be mildly deleterious to discipline, are too important too ban.
Ted
Half the time supreme court decisions require mental contortions to interpret anyway.
Rome Again
Well, I hadn’t had any yet, and totally missed it.
Rome Again
and that’s the difference between the last decision and this decision, which John took the opportunity to attack the “50 liberals” who agreed with the last decision.
ThymeZone
Fuckin DUH, man. Those are two completely different things, as if anyone older than 8 wouldnt know it.
But a teacher controls the class. If the teacher needs to tell a kid to shut up, she should do so, without consulting with you or the other lawyers.
jesse's girl
You know, I’m pretty darned fond of the Bill of Rights, but I still don’t understand all the surprised outrage at the Bong Hits decision. Has it really been that long since some of you have been in school? Students don’t have full constitutional rights, and the courts have been saying as much for decades now. A school can search your locker without cause. They can set as arbitrary a dress code as they like, and change or enforce it as they see fit. And talk to some of the kids on the school paper — there’s no such thing as the right to a free student press.
When I was in high school, veboten items that would earn you disciplinary action of varying severity included Levi’s “Button-Fly” t-shirts and the Green Day album “Dookie”. One kid got detention for reciting the Pledge of Allegience incorrectly over the intercom and another one got suspension for dressing up as the Trojan Man on Halloween.
The school’s not always right, but it’s in charge. And the students are usually smart-asses, but sometimes they’ve got a valid point. But last week’s school decision wasn’t the landmark that the press is pretending it is. It’s just covering the same old ground in new lame ways.
John Cole
Look- I was wrong aboutthis outcome, but I don’t think I was wrong about the first post the other day. I think it is wrong and dangerous to take the sort of attitude that we need to tell kids to stfu and censor their speech for order.
You disagree with me- fine. But spare me the moaning, wailing, and gnashing of teeth about people not getting involved or speaking out when their corrupt government works against their interests. After all, you guys are the ones who insist that part of a good education is spending 15 years programming kids to STFU and respect authority.
ThymeZone
Really? Can you point to the post that says that?
Kids are told to STFU because the teacher, or the kid who has the floor, cannot be heard otherwise. That isn’t programming, it’s basic management of the time and space.
Not everything is political, despite the best attempts of political blogs to make it look that way. Some things are just basic common sense.
demimondian
I’m not TZ, and I’ve stayed out of this. Will you listen to me, John?
I’m not an absolutist on either side. I think that kids in school do have rights, and that those rights are routinely violated in the name of the war on drugs. Hell, hemi’s were violated in a mass sweep at his school earlier this year — in which the school was put under lockdown so that the cops could do a random drug sweep. (Finding nothing, of course, but terrifying a slough of innocent children.) I also recognize that those rights are somewhat more limited than the rights they enjoy outside of the classroom, and that those are more limited than those they will enjoy when they reach adulthood.
I *don’t* like the Bong Hits 4 Jesus decision, but it would be clearly right if the government has a clear interest in restricting the advocacy of illegal drug use. By contrast, the Vermont decision is clearly right. It’s a nuanced set of decisions which accurately reflect the difficult corner cases of school discipline.
Rome Again
Funny thing, I didn’t come out one way or the other on the previous thread, yet, because I agreed with TZ’s assessment that children in school would run rampant without supervision, and I feel your attack of others who felt the previous decision was correct is wrong, I’m supposed to spare you?
John, you took the opportunity in your misunderstood post to attack others who didn’t agree with you on the last thread, yet you want people to spare you the moaning about your disagreement of views some people had on the last post. The moaning was coming for you, John. You took the opportunity to twist the knife in when you felt you were right (and you weren’t). You want it both ways, huh?
My problem wasn’t with your stance, in either thread, it was with your attack strategy. I guess, being the owner of this blog allows you to treat others any way you wish, yet, you get upset when others do it to you. Waaaaah!
ThymeZone
This would seem less disigenuous without the “but.”
Are we to be told how to disagree with you? By the guy who doesn’t think 12-year-olds need to be told to shut up?
Fascinating.
ThymeZone
Heh.
John Cole
What do 12 year olds have to do with the bong hits decision?
Oh yeah, they don’t. They are just your excuse for siding with the school in that case because there needs to be ‘order.’ “For the kids” sounds just as stupid when it comes from liberals as it does from right-wingers.
Of course I am not saying you should not be able to discipline unruly kids- hell, the kid wasn’t standing in class screaming ‘bonghits for jesus’ and being disruptive.
And one last thing- ifyou ask me, one of the main problems with schools is that there are too many damned rules and too much zero-tolerance mentality. You walk into any school, the first thing most of you will see is a list of 40 things on the wall that you can’t do. In addition to that, schools give the equivalent to the death penalty for anything and everything these days- there is no sense of proportion, and always a heightened and hysterical sense of threat from the nanny crowd.
I think part of this is brought on by school shootings, part of it by the drug hysteria, part of it being from distorted sense from everyone that life is somehow supposed to be 100% safe for everyone all the time. You do not have to dig real deep to find a number of cases of kids being expelled from schools forbringing their asthma medicine (drugs!) or toenail clippers (weapons!) to school.
When I was a kid I carried a pocket knife to school and at Brooke High there was an odds on chance that half my friends had deer rifles in their cars in the parking lot. Today, that would get you the death penalty.
John Cole
Rome Again-
I am cranky.
Rome Again
Have some Hola Fruita and watch some “Lost” and you’ll feel better. ;)
ThymeZone
Great story. What does it have to do with simple, basic maintaining of order in a classroom full of children?
Thanks to lawyers and other dickheads, it has gotten harder and harder to just do things like tell a kid to sit down and shut up.
Meanwhile, how is basic education going? Getting better all time, right? Kids’ skills in the Three R’s are just going through the roof, especially in crowded city schools, right? Public education, which in my experience has been on the verge of forfeiting all of its discipline over kids to the blatherings of permissive morons, is just getting better all the time. Isnt’ it?
ThymeZone
OMFG, I can’t believe you said that.
Seriously, more of you ought to observe my simple but elegant “Never Post Drunk” rule. It is there for your protection.
Gee, I dunno John, but I was 13 when I entered high school and 16 when I graduated. Of course, before that, I went to elementary school. Institutions which might be said to be related to the ones affected by the decision?
Just saying.
John Cole
PPGAZ-
It has to do with how things have changed, and not for the better. And again, remember my response to the notion that guns should be allowed on college campuses- it is a hideous idea. I would argue there has been too much senseless discipline and too many arbitrary rules, and that sends the message that none of the rules are important.
At any rate, explain to me how disciplining the bong hits for jesus moron helps you quell the number of unruly kids who are refusing to sit down and shut up?
Rome Again
I don’t see that name on this thread. Why did you do that? Was there some kind of ulterior motive there? Hmmmm…
Perhaps that person doesn’t use that name anymore for a particular reason and you care not to respect that decision or the possible reason for it.
That was dirty, IMHO.
ThymeZone
It supports the authority of the school to control the kids. As I said more or less on the other, first thread to this topic. It’s about the authority of the school.
It’s not about George Bush and his Scotus appointments. It’s about the case itself. The case is about whether the school has jurisdiction over the kid. I say it does, and must. IOW, don’t screw with the authority of the school, it exists for a good reason.
That’s my argument. What’s yours? That teaching college kids is a lot easier than teaching their little brothers and sisters? Well, duh. With educational and discipline standards out the window, who in their right mind would want to be a k-12 teacher today?
ThymeZone
On this we agree, zero tolerance is BS. However, senseless discipline does not reflect badly on ordinary, sensible discipline. It reflects badly on senseless discipline.
srv
ppGaz, you’re an idiot. Free Speech – I don’t think those words mean what you think they mean.
Andrew
I think we should put unruly students in burlap sacks and beat them about the ankles with reeds from the swamp. Then to the coal mines with those louts!
Psycheout
ThymeZone is mostly correct here. Children need to learn early on to be respectful of authority so they can become productive and decent members of society.
Scurrilous accusations against the President do not belong in our schools. They belong at Woodstock. It would be interesting to see this or a similar case revisited once President Bush gets one or two more Justices on the Supreme Court.
Chad N. Freude
Respect doesn’t seem to enter into TZ’s thinking (or writing for that matter). His original statement in this thread was a sweeping generalization which, in a subsequent comment, he said isn’t general at all. So far, TZ’s part of the discussion has been exclusively about the teacher’s need and right to maintain order
ThymeZone
Your application for the position of archivist of my work will be kept on file. But for now, we regret to inform you that we cannot schedule you for an interview.
“Frederick’s argument that this is not a school speech case is rejected. The event … was sanctioned … as an approved social event at which the district’s student-conduct rules expressly applied.”
IOW, the school had the right to shut the student up, by virtue of taking his banner down.
The end. Just because the stupid kid and his even stupider legal team decided to make a very bad free speech case out of the thing, doesn’t make it a great speech issue. It’s about whether a school can set rules and enforce them.
Like I said, from the get to.
The quotes, ellipses mine, are from the court’s published decision.
ThymeZone
You’re a little late to that party, pal.
But anyway, before I crack the seal on this cyanide pellet and end it all in the face of your humiliating put down, I’ll wait for you to tell me what I think free speech is.
Take all the time you need.
ThymeZone
That would be clever, if irrlevant, had I uttered a word on that subject. The school’s right to enforce rules has nothing to do with the student’s need to respect authority. It has simply to do with the most basic requirements of running a school. Order has to be kept. Whether the stupid kids learn anything by it or not, an entirely different subject.
Your fascinating arguments on the subject of the need for less respect for authority by kids are eagerly awaited. The popcorn is in the mocrowave now.
Chad N. Freude
Don’t mistake curmudgeonliness for idiocy. Those of us who follow TZ sweeping up his droppings for the archives are keenly aware of the difference.
jake
So, are you going to sprinkle the cyanide over the whole bag or soak one piece for a Russian Roulette snacking experience?
ThymeZone
Get away from me, you lunatic.
Rome Again
Put those back where you found them, I’ve been notified the job is mine. ;) (and I got an immediate hire, no interview required)
Chad N. Freude
That was a typo. TZ meant “mockrowave”.
Chad N. Freude
Never! Unless you can get your good buddy John Roberts to issue a restraining order.
capelza
John Cole…you misread a decision and made a post about it and then didn’t take down the parts where you were spectacularily wrong…this is why you are my favourite blogger in the whole blogoshpehery thingy!
As someone who just survived the last kid graduating from high school….I agree with John. The ridiculous crap that the schools had for rules wasted more time than any numbskull kid with a 420 sign would. I have always been one to generally take the teachers side at first until I find out, because I do know that kids can be big whiners ( I was one too), but who the hell cares if a kid has a picture of Bob Marley on their t-shirt (not allowed because of his connection to the ganja)…
Schools do have a need to set sensible rules..I am okay with no weapons, but when some kid gets expelled (not suspended) during hunting season because he forgot to take a bullet out of his coat it’s just stupid. The kid even turned it in! It is the zero tolerance without an understanding of what really was going on…actually they did when several parents explained what happened, but they still expelled him.
Teachers do need an environment that is conducive to teaching, especially with the new guidelines, but when they have to worry about what a kid is wearing rather than what he/she is doing, the rules are counter-productive.
I am so grateful that I got to go to school when we could wear anything we wanted (they just asked that we come clothed..though hot pants caused some consternation in jr. high), and any dumb sign a kid put up was laughed at rather than something to be seen as a disciplinary action worthy of the big boot.
Oh and I am old enough, just, mind you, to remeber what it was like to have to kneel on the floor and if my skirt didn’t touch the ground I got sent home…are we back to those kinds of rules?
Kudos to the SCOTUS for this ruling…teenagers may be obnoxious little twerps but they are entitled to opinions, though I think they are even entitled to stupid ones like the 420 sign.
ThymeZone
Kids’ opinions have nothing to do with this case.
Hell, the stupid banner doesn’t even express a coherent opinion.
DungBeetles
ALL UR TURDS R BELONG TO US.
Rome Again
There are plenty of people who drop turds on this blog, TZ wouldn’t be my first choice, not even near the top.
capelza
And this is different from most teenage opinions how?
ThymeZone
Not at all!
Chad N. Freude
TZ says
In a probably unsuccessful attempt to sound serious, I ask then how is the principal justified in claiming the banner promoted drug use and suspending the kid?
TAX ANALYST
John Cole said:
“BTW- for long-time readers who might be keeping track, this keeps me at about a perfect 0 for 692 in interpreting court decisions.”
John, don’t you know what this MEANS? It means you are ready to move up from mere bloggerdom and become and OFFICIAL MEDIA PUNDIT, with all the perks and Sunday Morning Talking Heads-Show appearances…and invites to Chris Matthews “Hardball” so that you can make snarky jokes about political and judicial actions that fuck over huge numbers of innocent people. AND – being an OFFICIAL MEDIA PUNDIT means you never have to take responsibility for being totally wrong about anything…and still allows you to weigh in with breathless and self-important policy advice – made with all due cynicism from the perspective of the advice recipient’s “Political Cover” perspective. Congratulations! Keep up the bad work…you could go far…think “White House Correspondent” someday.
And on that “Someday” maybe all of us little people…blog reader’s & commenter’s…will look at you spewing BS on TV and think back to these days…sigh
Jay C
Heh. You may not be perfect, John: but you’re perfect for us… ;)
Punchy
Makin’ me hungry….
as for this:
Please wipe the brown material off your facial protrusion. Only his students are allowed to say shit like this.
DungBeetles
Heh. If only John Cole hadn’t apologized. If he’d instead denied making the first statement and/or blamed us for “misconstruing” his remarks and/or started ranting about America Haters (TM); he’d be presidential material.
chopper
ah, good point.
Punchy
Maybe next time he can wave the “Bung Hits 4 Jesus” to express his support for gay illegal immigrants.
Rome Again
Oh MY! I don’t want to know…
ThymeZone
I think she’s justified because she’s the principal and he’s acting like an idiot. Well, he is in fact an idiot.
He’s a stupid kid and she runs the school. Case closed.
Hooboy. See, man, when somebody tells you to eat shit? That’s just a figure of speech. Fecophagia is really not good for your health.
Prince Roy
yes, you were an idiot for misreading the post here, but your commenters you referred to are even bigger idiots for backing the court’s decision in the Bong Hits 4 Jesus case.
Prince Roy
yes, you were an idiot for misreading the post here, but your commenters you referred to are even bigger idiots for backing the court’s decision in the Bong Hits 4 Jesus case.
Zifnab
Yeah, except stupid is still protected under the First Amendment. Simply waving a guy off as “stupid” and shutting him up leads you to the ’02-’03 era of US Politics, where O’Reily-esque loudmouths can call you a moron and tell someone to cut your mic.
If a kid is disrupting class, he gets in trouble for disrupting class not expressing his (stupid) opinion. If I start shouting “Crack is the best drug ever!” in the middle of my gym class, I don’t see why I suddenly get punished MORE than if I start shouting my ABCs.
This kid was nailed specifically because of the content of his speech and had nothing to do with his disruption of learning activities. The only thing he was disrupting, according to the SCOTUS, was the last 18 years of government anti-drug propaganda getting force-feed down his fellow classmates’ throats. What the court has claimed is that a person under the age of 18 is not allowed to disagree with the government. And I think we can all agree that challenging a sitting government is specifically what the First Amendment is set up to protect. I eagerly await the kid who’s T-Shirt “I Heart Osama” manages to violate the US Patriot Act.
Face
I eagerly await the student(s) that beat the living shit out of the student who wears said shirt.
jake
It will be a lot of fun watching the definition of “Disruption,” evolve over the next few years. But I’m sure teachers won’t ignore this ruling, mis-interpret and mis-use the BH4J ruling in order to punish kids who express opinions that differ from their own.
Whew! Nothing to worry about kids.
Ted
I then eagerly await the police who arrest said student(s) for assault for beating someone who expresses unpopular opinions.
The unpopular spoken opinions are the only ones that need protection, after all. It never ceases to amaze me that a lot of people in this country seem to think that you have a right to not have the government interfere with the expression of unpopular opinions, but you DON’T have the right to your personal physical safety afterwards from your fellow citizens. You might as well just let the government do the beatings.
jesse's girl
And I’m sure that teachers and administrators haven’t been doing that since before BH4J kid was born. Also,student athletes never get preferential treatment, students with learning disabilities are always treated with the utmost respect, and no one judges teenagers based on how they dress.
Oh how I long for the days before the BH4J ruling, when high schools were bastions of liberty and free expression! In those days, which were possibly in the 50s when there were fewer immigrants and shorter lines at the post office,teenagers could say and do whatever they wanted without fear of reprisal. Truly, it was a paradise.
Tsulagi
In my high school I mentioned to a teacher I’d upgraded the trigger assembly in one rifle I used for deer hunting. Then he asked me to bring it to school. Wanted to check out the feel and how easy it was to adjust the pull. Did that in the school parking lot. No big deal then; can’t imagine doing that now.
Can’t stand the mindless zero tolerance crap. Where an obvious water pistol gets a student suspended. Mandatory sentencing and the three strikes and you’re out stuff. Leaving no room for a judge to use common sense in situations that scream for it. This is what passes for tough and smart for the right wing law and order set. They’d call for a high school senior’s head if he happened to carry a Swiss Army knife to school, but a few months later when he starts college, they think he should be packing a .357 to stop a Virginia Tech. That’s the solution. These people are stuck on stupid.
The Bong Hits 4 Jesus decision? It’s bullshit. This wasn’t needed to keep control in the classroom. Schools already had the means to enforce discipline whether students would unfurl paper banners in a classroom or belt out the Star Spangled Banner over and over in class. The justices didn’t use that in their reasoning. Instead they said schools could limit speech that promoted an illegal activity. So I guess our fine justices would be good if that banner instead had said Jesus Says No to Bong Hits. Lame.
What gets me is they even heard this case. Out of hundreds of cases that ask to be heard and aren’t, they thought this important? This was a school board level decision. What it tells me is if the mood stuck them, they’d be up to Schiavo your ass.
A few days ago Justice Breyer said “It is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much.” Welcome to the 28%er SCOTUS. They’re going to be doing a heckuva job.
Ted
Roe v Wade, among other rulings, will be reduced to meaninglessness before you know it! And the non-28%ers in the middle will wake up to just what they voted for in ’04.
Hell, if Brown v Board of Education is back on the table, who’s to say what will happen.
TAX ANALYST
Jesse’s girl says:
“Oh how I long for the days before the BH4J ruling, when high schools were bastions of liberty and free expression! In those days, which were possibly in the 50s when there were fewer immigrants and shorter lines at the post office,teenagers could say and do whatever they wanted without fear of reprisal. Truly, it was a paradise.”
Nice link-up of this thread to the fantasy of that fellow in the “Immigration” thread – the one stuck on 150 million people as the “Right” number of people for optimum life in the U.S. Yeah, those wonderful, wacky, care-free days of the 50’s. Sheesh…I wonder if that fellow ever had “nuclear attack” drills in school? I remember they had us hiding under our little wooden desks…even as an 11-year old I had it figured out that the next position was “kissing your little ass good-bye” if there really was one.
Wolfdaughter
Tax Analyst–I read the comments by Jesse’s Girl as being sarcastic, pointing out that schools are not exactly bastions of freedom and weren’t before the BH4J decision. Which is true, students are expected to follow more and stricter rules than adults, and this was true back when I was in EL-HI in the 50s and 60s.
Yes, schools do need to maintain a certain amount of discipline. But as a number of you have pointed out, schools can also go overboard. The example of expelling (or even disciplining) kids who bring asthma inhalers to school is particularly egregious. Rules need to be there for physical safety of students, and teachers can and do need to make students be quiet who are being disruptive.
But keep the rules to these sorts of things, please. Kids, especially teenagers, are often put off by arbitrary rules. If you make a lot of arbitrary rules, it will teach DISrespect for rules.
I also heartily disagree with Tymezone’s assertion that teachers are automatically right and students wrong. Teachers are more likely to be right, given that they are older and have more experience, but they are also human and make mistakes. I always had much more respect for teachers who admitted when they were wrong and treated it as a learning experience for them and the students. Who among us has not had at least one teacher who was a self-righteous bully who taught errors and never admitted to being wrong?
Bottom line…let’s have some common sense, and err on the side of fewer rules to the extent possible. Allow children and teenagers to express opinions during class discussions. Allow them to wear T-shirts with political messages. The kid who did the BH4J made a stupid sign.
Why not use that as a springboard for discussion about why the sign would be offensive to some people? They have a right to their opinions also. Why not discuss free speech and where does my right to express myself stop at your right not to be offended? Instead of being all arbitrary about it and further diminishing kids’ respect for authority at that school?
TAX ANALYST
Wolfdaughter – yes, I’m sure J.Girl’s comments were sarcastic. School discipline? Yes, there has to be some. Should everything be reduced to a “Zero-tolerance” situation? Of course not…that’s ludicrous on the face of it. The application of “Common Sense” would be welcome relief in this area, but advocates of “Common Sense”, well, they tend to get drowned out by the “Do something NOW” segment who flip out over singular acts and want to pass laws prohibiting things that personally upset them. I say “Phooey” on that mind-set (actually, I usually have a stronger and less acceptable response, but there’s really no need to throw around four-letter epithets right now).
And BTW, my comments on J.G.’s remarks were more in reference to a prior thread where some fellow was lamenting U.S. over-population and had this figure of “150 million” and the 1950’s era as being some sort of demarcation point after which life here went downhill. He didn’t just mention it once, he steadfastly clung to those specifics for what appeared to be several hours of back-and-forth discussion. I felt she was clearly and effectively spoofing that fellow.
So I think you are not only from the same approximate era (I graduated HS in Feb 1968…whew, that’s a long time ago), but that we mostly agree here. Thanks.
jesse's girl
I did go to high school during the ‘War on Drugs,’ and hoisting that sign across from the high school probably would have earned me and my classmates a long round of detention, even if no one cared if kids carried knives unless they were switchblades. But as far as I’m concerned, you’re both right. Personally, I think the Morse case was full of losers — the school shouldn’t have suspended the kid, but I don’t agree with his decision to sue the school over a week’s suspension, either. In the end, Bong Boy wound up costing the those who would like further extension of civil liberties to high schoolers a Court decision, all for the worthy cause of acting like an ass in front of a camera.
In the long run, I don’t think this ruling is going to have as much of an effect as, say, Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier in limiting student rights. Among other things, most schools these days have a no tolerance drug policy that would extend to things like clothing and banners. Some of them even say that you can’t have these sort of things within x number of feet of school property. The rules may not be consistently enforced, but most students know that if they decide to wear a shirt that says ‘Make Meth, Not War’ or something, they’re taking their chances. And since the Courts have established (and maintained) that the decision applies only to pro-drug messages, it really didn’t restrict any rights that hadn’t already been restricted by the schools and the courts previously.
As for our good friend from the immigration thread — it would be interesting to hear his take on this. On the one hand, overpopulation couldn’t be blamed, since Juneau’s only got about 11 people per square mile. On the other hand, this never would have happened in the 50s, because Alaska wasn’t a state. What to do?
TAX ANALYST
JG – Well, then I think “Mr. 1950’s” answer would be rather clear-cut…if this happened in Alaska when Alaska wasn’t a State then it wouldn’t matter to him at all…his main and perhaps only concern seemed to be personal comfort and elbow room, so unless Young Mr. Bong Hit wanted to cross over into the Continental United States I don’t think he’d much care. However, as far BongHit goes, if he DID happen to cross over into the U.S. and DID happen to POSSESS any marijuana he would have been subject to YEARS in a penitentiary…and how’s that for another “Great thing” about the less-populated US of A from that era, eh?
Jake
You forgot the pony. Every student got a pony.
And yeah, it has ever been thus, which is one reason I considered high school a preview of Hell. But I think this SC ruling make it much worse because your friendly neighborhood authoritarian teacher will think the SC has told him/her throwing out “disruptive” students is mandatory. “He disagreed with me when I said 2 + 2 = 5!”
Gah.
Of course, the first time a kid gets thrown out of school for insisting that the world was created in six days you’ll see 28%ers marching on the SC to demand a do over.
Don
Given that it happened off-campus and there was never a mention in the ruling of any disruption, what did the Bong Hits 4 Jesus case have to do with maintaining order in a classroom either?
If the Supremes didn’t want to make a statement about advocating breaking a law (like, say, some that have existed in the past in the form of poll taxes or where you sit on a bus) they could have simply glommed onto the off-site nature and fact that the student had never reported to class. Instead they took a deliberate tack on that matter.
So if you want to stomp your foot in favor of their decision, do so based on the decision itself, not what you want to interpret it to mean. No great strides in the pursuit of order over chaos were made in this ruling.