April 5, 2007
Defining Free Speech IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:30 AM EST When discussing the “Bong Hits for Jesus” case, I should have been more explicit in stating that we were dealing with children and school, which makes it a special, not a general, free-speech case. Children have their civil rights restricted frequently because they are, well, children. To not do so would be folly. And schools have an obligation to maintain an environment conducive to learning. If that requires restrictions on free speech (and it does), then so be it. Children are in school for only a fraction of their time and can express themselves fully the rest of the time, so what is lost is minimal and what is gained is considerable. That seems an entirely reasonable tradeoff to me. I think my analogy to the man serving on a jury is apposite here. While in the jury box his free-speech rights are severely restricted, and for good reason. The fact that the boy was, physically, not on school property is neither here nor there. The students had been let out of school solely for the purpose of watching the Olympic torch go by. They were thus subject to school discipline just as though they were on a class trip to, say, a museum. If the school had a right to tell the boy to take down his sign, had he been carrying it in a school corridor, then it had a right to tell him to take it down in this instance. Mr. Zeitz writes, “. . . if we allow students to wear crosses or stars of David on the grounds of religious freedom, why can’t a student in Alaska hoist a banner that invokes Jesus?” Because he wasn’t expressing a religious sentiment. By his own admission he was only trying to provoke a reaction from school authorities. It was just a stunt, a rather amusing and clever one, but a stunt. That’s why I think this case is a Hurricane Katrina in a nearly microscopic teapot. Just because someone yells “Free Speech!” doesn’t mean we have to send our brains to the dry cleaners and cower before the majesty of the expression. Part of the problem here, undoubtedly, is the concept of “zero tolerance” regarding drugs, etc., which is why the school principal ordered the boy to take down the sign. Schools, especially public schools, are necessarily run by bureaucracies, and bureaucracies love hard-and-fast rules, as they require no thinking or even common sense. But the idiocies that result from “zero tolerance” are legion (see
here). Mr. Zeitz points out a girl disciplined for wearing Winnie-the-Pooh socks. My favorite is the six-year-old boy who was suspended for sexual harassment, having touched another six-year-old “inappropriately.” (You would think that a school would be familiar with the way six-year-olds actually behave, but apparently not in this case.) The boy had to sign a statement on the matter (I guess he used block letters) before his parents were called. Does anyone think that a six-year-old is capable of understanding the meaning of “sexual harassment”? Best of luck explaining it to one. So, as I said in my first post on this subject, the first mistake was the school’s reaction to the sign. It had nothing to do with drugs and nothing to do with religion. It should have been ignored and the boy should have later on been given one of those now-you-see-here-young-man lectures we all remember so fondly. Had that been done, maybe a half million dollars in legal fees and court costs would have been saved. The money, instead, could have been used to fight malaria in Africa (probably behind a subscription wall, alas) and saved the lives of dozens of school kids. There’s a reason Jefferson listed life as the first of the unalienable rights with which we are all divinely endowed.
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