Bong Hits 4 Jesus!

Apparently, surrealistic satire is not protected speech. Crooks and Liars seems to have the best summary of this story.

The phrase doesn’t make any sense, and it wasn’t supposed to. 18 year old high school senior Joseph Frederick unfurled the 14 foot banner on a public sidewalk across the street from the high school during a non-school event. High school administrator Deborah Morse confiscated the banner and suspended Frederick for “advocating drug use” evidently in view of other high school students.

And yesterday, the Supreme Court backed her up and said that Frederick’s right to free speech did not include reasonably interpreted discussion of drug use in a high school setting.

Scott Lemieux points out Justice Stevens' comment:

... I take the Court’s point that the message on Frederick’s banner is not necessarily protected speech, even though it unquestionably would have been had the banner been unfurled elsewhere. As to the second, I am willing to assume that the Court is correct that the pressing need to deter drug use supports JDHS’s rule prohibiting willful conduct that expressly “advocates the use of substances that are illegal to minors.” But it is a gross non sequitur to draw from these two unremarkable propositions the remarkable conclusion that the school may suppress student speech that was never meant to persuade anyone to do anything.

He also commented that the ruling "does serious violence to the First Amendment."

Look, the banner was nonsensical and probably satirical, in a weird, slipstream sort of way. I think it's funny. What bothers me is that we have a whole fleet of school administrators, lawyers, and Supreme Court justices who just don't get it.

Looking a some of the most recent decisions, the Roberts Court is shaping up to be a real disaster, coming down in favor of sex discrimination in salary, state-supported religion, the right of wealthy donors and well-healed PACs to influence elections (strange how they have free speech rights and a high-school kid doesn't)*, and of the government's right to retaliate for exercise of constitutional rights. I shudder to think what this bunch will do with any suits coming out of the Justice Deparment sell-out.

Lemieux has spotted a principle:

. . . In fairness, Scalia and Thomas have created a clear, identifiable principle: standing rules should be liberal when they are likely to produce conservative outcomes and narrow when they are likely to produce liberal outcomes. Whether this is a defensible principle I leave to the reader.

There's a lot of commentary among the contributors at Volokh Conspiracy that's worth reading. Just start scrolling down. (Or use the links -- they're savvy enough to group them at the end of each post.)

* For a scathing commentary on the Court's incoherence on Free Speech, see this article from the Houston Chronicle.