Bong hits 4 students' free-speech rights

A federal case involving an Alaska student’s free-speech rights touches on issues that hit close to home here. As the New York Times reported this weekend, high school student Joseph Frederick unfurled a banner reading "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" during an Olympic torch procession through Juneau in 2002. It was off school property, though during school time, and principal Deborah Morse ordered him to take it down. He refused, she tore it down and gave him a 10-day suspension, so he sued. Morse objected to the sign’s apparent advocacy for marijuana. Frederick said it was simply taken from a snowboard slogan to be "meaningless and funny" for the TV cameras – in other words, a typical teen prank.

This seems to be much ado about very little, but the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments today on Morse v. Frederick as a test of previous court rulings over the rights of school administrators to limit student speech when it conflicts with the school’s "educational mission." Those principles were in play in our area with a recent flap over an article in a student publication at Princeton High School critical of the school’s football program.

Whether you think a student ought to or should be allowed to advocate drugs, even in apparent jest and even away from school, is one thing. But the government here is arguing something far more sweeping – that administrators have the right to ban virtually any speech that conflicts with the "educational mission," and that they have the right to define that mission as they wish.

Unfortunately, as with too many First Amendment issues, the Bush administration is arguing the case for restricting rights. As the Times notes, the so-called "religious right" supports Frederick, despite his sign’s irreverent "Jesus" reference, because they are concerned, as counsel Jay Alan Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice writes, that public schools "face a constant temptation to impose a suffocating blanket of political correctness upon the educational atmosphere." That’s a valid concern. Schools pay lip service to diversity, but that doesn’t always extend to diversity of opinion or ideology. Education is not homogenization.