'SERIOUS VIOLENCE TO THE FIRST AMENDMENT'

Speech in this country may still be free in the minds of some. But
don't tell that to Joseph Frederick, the then-18-year-old high school
student from Alaska who held up a sign that said "Bong Hits 4 Jesus"
as the torch for the Winter Olympics passed through his hometown in
2002.

For his transgression, Frederick was suspended for 10 days by his
principal after she took the sign away from him and his friends.

Frederick sued the school district over his suspension. And last week,
in one of a number of alarming decisions on speech, race and education
that should give every American cause to pause, a deeply divided US
Supreme Court ruled against him.

With 23 organizations filing friend of the court, or amicus curiae,
briefs in support of Frederick's cause, and with a number of states,
including California, already making medical marijuana use a legal
activity, it seemed as though the brazen youngster with the stupid
sign had a pretty solid case.

Unfortunately he did not, according to Chief Justice John Roberts.
Like all good judges, Roberts weighed the right of the individual
against the government's need to regulate the activity in question and
decided that the government needed to stifle Frederick.

Seven briefs were filed in support of Frederick by conservative,
religious liberties groups including the Alliance Defense Fund, the
American Center for Law and Justice, the Center for Individual Rights,
the Christian Legal Society, the Liberty Counsel, the Liberty Legal
Institute and the Rutherford Institute, according to a recent report
by the Student Press Law Center ( http://www.splc.org/newsflash.asp?id=1462
).

Others were filed by the Drug Policy Alliance, Lambda Legal Defense
and Education Fund, the National Coalition Against Censorship and
Students for Sensible Drug Policy. The Student Press Law Center filed
a brief in support of Frederick's claim on behalf of five First
Amendment organizations.

While disappointing, the ruling was hardly surprising. For quite some
time, and particularly since 9/11, the government's list of behavioral
prohibitions has grown exponentially, and all of its many needs
apparently can only be fed from what bloated bureaucrats carve off
what's left of the Bill of Rights.

The government needs to be "safe" not only from divergent political
philosophies, like communism and socialism, two major reasons for
crackdowns on speech in the last century, and terrorism, which already
in this century has trumped any number of other rights, but now also
even from the very mention of marijuana.

As a lawyer for one of the religious groups pointed out, the kid was
on his own time and standing on a city street when he and his friends
waved the crazy sign, undercutting Roberts' rationale that the
school's policy against drugs gave officials a right to do what they
did.

Mathew Staver of the Liberty Counsel, a legal group that advocates
religious freedom and family tradition, told Student Press reporter
Erica Hudock that the district's reason for appeal "doesn't match the
facts." One such "fact" involved a ruling in Frederick's favor that
found a prior court had erroneously believed the sign waving was part
of a school-sponsored activity, which it wasn't.

But an even more compelling reason to not side with the school
district, wrote the Liberty Counsel, is that "[Frederick] was
basically fooling around to get the TV cameras on him. We have to make
sure they don't decide it for the wrong reason, to hurt people who do
have serious messages."

Justice John Paul Stevens upbraided his colleagues for "inventing out
of whole cloth" a drug advocacy exception to the First Amendment.

Frederick's message "neither violates a permissible rule nor expressly
advocates conduct that is illegal and harmful to students. This
nonsense banner does neither, and the Court does serious violence to
the First Amendment in upholding -- indeed, lauding -- a school's
decision to punish Frederick for expressing a view with which it
disagreed," wrote Stevens.

Maybe something to remember is what Ben Franklin once said about
freedom: "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a
little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

When rulings like this occur, we have to wonder how much of either we
actually have left.