Bong Hits 4 Jesus

OK, I admit, I love this news story. It just about throws a double-left-handed frontways-screwball at you.

The story starts when this kid in high school wants to get on TV, and ... you have kids? Listen, they sometimes surprise you, you might say, and not always in the way that you would have really asked for.

So the Olympics were coming up, and the torch was coming through this kid's town (Juneau, Alaska), and the schools let the kids out to go see it.

Well, this kid makes a big sign that says "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" on it, and when the torch comes by, he holds it up. The principal is standing there, she tells him to take it down, he doesn't. She tears it up and tells him to go to her office right now.

OK, that's great. I have no idea in the world what he thinks his sign meant, but it's got all the elements, doesn't it?

Well, I don't know if he was on TV that day, but he's certainly been in the papers since then.

The principal kicks him out of school for ten days.

Mr. Fredericks’s ensuing lawsuit and the free-speech court battle that resulted, in which he has prevailed so far, is one that, classically, pits official authority against student dissent. It is the first Supreme Court case to do so directly since the court upheld the right of students to wear black arm bands to school to protest the war in Vietnam, declaring in Tinker v. Des Moines School District that “it can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

The court followed that 1969 decision with two others during the 1980s that upheld the authority of school officials to ban vulgar or offensive student speech and to control the content of school newspapers. Clearly there is some tension in the court’s student-speech doctrine; what message to extract from the trio of decisions is the basic analytical question in the new case, Morse v. Frederick, No. 06-278. What is most striking is how the two sides line up. Free-Speech Case Divides Bush and Religious Right

Now the question is, what exactly did the kid do wrong? He wasn't at school when he held up the sign.

This article explains one weird thing about the case. The kid, Joseph Frederick, has a bunch of organizations supporting him: the ACLU and the National Coalition Against Censorship, naturally, but also ...

... the American Center for Law and Justice, founded by the Rev. Pat Robertson; the Christian Legal Society; the Alliance Defense Fund, an organization based in Arizona that describes its mission as “defending the right to hear and speak the Truth”; the Rutherford Institute, which has participated in many religion cases before the court; and Liberty Legal Institute, a nonprofit law firm “dedicated to the preservation of First Amendment rights and religious freedom.”

On the other hand, taking the school's side, is the National School Board Association, two school principals’ groups, several antidrug organizations, Ken Starr, and the Bush Administration.

Ken Starr?

Yes, Ken Starr.

I guess the religious groups want to make sure you can't get kicked out of school for holding up a sign that says "Jesus" on it. The drug groups, the anti-drug groups, those are pretty easy to understand. The school board organization, of course, they're supporting their own.

Ken Starr? The Bush administration? Aren't these kind of big guns to bring in for a kid holding up a sign?

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.

In an interview, Professor Laycock said that religiously observant students often find the atmosphere in public school to be unwelcoming and “feel themselves a dissident and excluded minority.” As the Jehovah’s Witnesses did in the last century, these students are turning to the courts.

The briefs from the conservative religious organizations depict the school environment as an ideological battleground. The Christian Legal Society asserts that its law school chapters “have endured a relentless assault by law schools intolerant of their unpopular perspective on the morality of homosexual conduct or the relevance of religious belief.”

The American Center for Law and Justice brief, filed by its chief counsel, Jay Alan Sekulow, warns that public schools “face a constant temptation to impose a suffocating blanket of political correctness upon the educational atmosphere.”

Hey, man, those are some rebellious dudes, those church guys.

Really, this is an unusual alliance of bong-hitters and Jesus freaks, don't you think?

The religious groups were particularly alarmed by what they saw as the implication that school boards could define their “educational mission” as they wished and could suppress countervailing speech accordingly.

“Holy moly, look at this! To get drugs we can eliminate free speech in schools?” is how Robert A. Destro, a law professor at Catholic University, described his reaction to the briefs for the school board when the Liberty Legal Institute asked him to consider participating on the Mr. Frederick’s behalf. He quickly signed on.

And don't get me started on the "war on drugs."

But does anybody understand why the Bush administration has even heard about this kid holding up this sign in Juneau?

This same Catholic University professor talks about it.

Having worked closely with Republican administrations for years, Mr. Destro said he was hard pressed to understand the administration’s position. “My guess is they just hadn’t thought it through,” he said in an interview. “To the people who put them in office, they are making an incoherent statement.”

The solicitor general’s office does not comment publicly on its cases. But Mr. Starr, by contrast, was happy to talk about the case and the alignment against him of many of his old allies. “It’s reassuring to have lots of friends of liberty running around,” he said in a cheerful tone, adding: “I welcome this outpouring because it will help the court see that it shouldn’t go too far either way.”

What he means by that, I don't know.

The administration's position as conservatives is incoherent. As an authoritarian regime, though, they are perfectly consistent.