The "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case is going to the Supreme Court.
Five years ago Joe Frederick, a high school senior in Juneau, Alaska, made a 14-foot paper banner reading "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" and displayed it with the help of some of his friends at a parade on the street in front of his school. He did it for attention, saying he wanted media coverage, and also wanted to piss off his principal. He achieved both objectives.
According to an ABC News story, "Principal Deborah Morse, who had previously disciplined Frederick for other acts of protest, confiscated the banner and suspended Frederick, sparking a feud that has gone all the way to the Supreme Court."
The ACLU and other free speech advocates fear that when the current version of the Supreme Court takes up this case on Monday, March 19, they might be inclined to revise the Tinker vs. Des Moines ruling of 1969, in which Mary Beth Tinker, a 13-year-old junior high school student, was exonerated after being suspended by school authorities for wearing a black armband to school to protest the Vietnam War.
That case ended with a majority of the justices declaring that students do not "shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate."
Tinker, now 54, remains an involved advocate of students' rights and is in touch with Joseph Frederick. She says she will be in court this Monday as an "active observer." For his part, Frederick, now 23 and teaching English in China, says he first saw the offending phrase on a snowboard, and believes it is meaningless. He still feels his 15-day suspension from school for displaying the banner was unfair.
Nobody disputes that there was bad blood between the student and the principal. Previous to the banner incident, Morse had called police to remove Frederick from a school common area he refused to leave, and the following day he refused to stand in class for the pledge of allegience.
Morse still defends her suspension of Frederick, even though the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declared it illegal and held her personally liable. Her brief to the Supreme Court says in part that the Ninth Circuit ruling undermines "the vital task of teachers, administrators and volunteer school board members in attending holistically to the needs...students entrusted...to their charge."
"Holistic" is a favored bit of contemporary academic jargon, sometimes used as a justification for repression, speech control, mind control, and thought policing.
The high-profile case has drawn in several significant legal players, and Morse's defense, besides being buttressed by lawyers from the National Association of School Boards, has received an offer of pro bono assistance from Kenneth Starr, America's favorite goody two-shoes.
Frederick is represented by lawyers from the ACLU, among others. The ABC story notes that "Steve R. Shapiro, legal director at the ACLU, argued Frederick's protest was not at school and is therefore not a case of student free speech.
"'They didn't like what he said, and the thought he wanted to convey, and it was censored,' said Shapiro. 'That would permit schools to censor student speech whenever they chose to and completely unravel the Court's understanding of the last 40 years.'"
However since the 1969 Tinker decision, the court has issued rulings which more strictly limit the protection of student speech. The most significant was the Hazelwood vs. Kuhlmeier case, in which a student newspaper article featuring interviews with students who had become pregnant was censored by the school's principal. Even though the paper's editors did not use the girls' real names, the principal argued, and the Supreme Court agreed, that their identity was not sufficiently secured by the simple expedient of fictional names.
Previewing the Frederick case, Martha Minow, a Harvard Law School professor, says "The student has a better case than the school, but the trend of the Supreme Court has been toward curbing student speech and increasing deference to school administrators. If the school district wins here, it could have important ramifications."
UPDATE: The New York Times's Linda Greenhouse yesterday reported a bizarre twist in this case which has united the efforts of the ACLU with religious right groups such as Pat Robertson's American Center for Law and Justice.
When the Supreme Court begins hearing evidence in the Frederick case today, it will encounter an "array of briefs from organizations that litigate and speak on behalf of the religious right that has lifted Morse v. Frederick out of the realm of the ordinary," Greenhouse says.
This is happening because the name of Jesus appeared on Frederick's banner, and because dedicated Christians often feel they are a repressed minority in public institutions, which a spokesman for Robertson's group says "face a constant temptation to impose a suffocating blanket of political correctness upon the educational atmosphere."
Greenhouse reports that "(The) Liberty Legal Institute, a nonprofit law firm 'dedicated to the preservation of First Amendment rights and religious freedom' and based in Plano, Texas told the justices in its brief that it was 'gravely concerned that the religious freedom of students in public schools will be damaged' if the court rules for the school board.
"Lawyers on Mr. Frederick’s side offer a straightforward explanation for the strange-bedfellows aspect of the case. 'The status of being a dissident unites dissidents on either side,' said Prof. Douglas Laycock of the University of Michigan Law School, an authority on constitutional issues involving religion who worked on Liberty Legal Institute’s brief."
Freedom of speech issues combine some very strange bedfellows, united in this case against the Bush administration, which has entered the case on the side of Principal Morse and the Juneau School Board. They will be represented in court, Greenhouse reports, by Kenneth Starr.
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