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, Joseph Frederick unfurled a banner reading
"Bong Hits 4 Jesus" during an Olympic torch procession 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 suspended him, 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 - a typical teen prank.

This seems to be much ado about very little, but it has reached the
Supreme Court 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.

As with too many First Amendment issues, the Bush administration is
arguing to restrict rights. The so-called "religious right" supports
Frederick, despite his sign's irreverent "Jesus" reference, because
they are concerned, as counsel Jay Alan Sekulow 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.