Free Speech? Are you Fucking Kidding me?

"Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case fails in Supreme Court ruling. "The winning side in the case was quick to assert that the decision was not anti-free speech." Are you absolutely serious Chief Justice Roberts? How is this not a violation of free speech? The argument even goes on to say that Political and Religious speech is still protected, yet how could one not see the political and religious ties in those 4 words? Yes, the students argument is that the phrase was just gibberish. Yes, it is slightly inappropriate to have that sign at an Olympic torch ceremony. But so what? Does that make it so wrong that one could not display the sign? Was there a riot started? Did the torch get so offended that it decided not to burn? No. None of this happened. Yet it seems as if our overtly conservative, anti-change Supreme Court, (which will now be referred to as the Council of Out-of Touch Elderly Fucks and a Couple Good Ones) is on its way to overturning Tinker v. Des Moines.

Tinker v. Des Moines is the case where five public school students (including high school student John Tinker and his sister, jr. high student—Mary Beth Tinker) got suspended for wearing black armbands to school in December 1965 to protest the Vietnam War. They won. Thankfully. In the majority 7-2 opinion, Justice Abe Fortas famously wrote: "It can hardly be argued that students shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech at the schoolhouse gate."

Great excerpt from the arguments in which Justice Thurgood Marshall speaks with the Des Moines schoolboard lawyer, Allan Herrick.
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Herrick: We had a situation here where it was explosive… All right. This is page 70, at the top of the Appendix. “A former student at one of our high schools was killed in Vietnam. Some of his friends are still in school. It was felt that if any kind of a demonstration existed, it might evolve into something which would be difficult to control.”

Justice Marshall: Do we have a city in this country that hasn’t had someone killed in Vietnam?

Herrick: No, I think not, Your Honor, but I don’t think it would be an explosive situation in most cases. But if someone is going to appear in court with an armband here, protesting the thing, that it could be explosive. That is the situation we find ourselves in.

Marshall: It COULD be.

Herrick: What?

Marshall: It COULD be. Is that your position? And there is no evidence that it WOULD be? Is that the rule you want us to adopt?

Herrick: No, not at all, Your Honor.



***Update***
The Student Press Law Center has its own response to the article.