Word: bong
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...drugs, remember?) while reading Chief Justice John Roberts' opinion undermining student speech rights. The ruling reads like nothing so much as a goofy TV ad denouncing pot, but in the end, Roberts gets it about right when he says the case of the kid suspended for unfurling a "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" banner across from school "hardly justifies sounding the First Amendment bugle...
...court, Roberts stresses that "drug abuse can cause severe and permanent damage to the health and well-being of young people" and so "deterring drug use by school children" is justification enough for silencing a student. But as even the chief acknowledges, it is far from clear whether Bong Hits 4 Jesus is a pro-drug message or just a bunch of nonsense, an ambiguity that puts the court's reasoning on shaky ground...
...principal argued that she thought the message was about pot smoking and that it broke school rules against promoting illegal drugs, and Roberts agrees with her. He attempts a lawyerly gloss on the whole discussion by launching into an exegesis of the possible meanings of Bong Hits 4 Jesus, explaining that it "could be interpreted as an imperative" (DO bong hits), a celebration of drug use (bong hits are GOOD) or "gibberish" (TOO MANY bong hits). In any event, he concludes that it must have some meaning, and since the one the principal gave it is as good...
...such a restriction, it invents "out of whole cloth a special First Amendment rule permitting the censorship of any student speech that mentions drugs." Stevens is fine with a rule that prohibits students from promoting illegal drugs. But no matter what the principal argued in this case, the bong-hits banner conveyed "nonsense," speech "that was never meant to persuade anyone to do anything...
...better lines from Monday's opinions, Stevens explains that most students knew the bong-hits message had no meaning, because most of them "do not shed their brains at the schoolhouse gate." And so to allow schools to ban speech that merely alludes to drugs might, he says, squelch "a full and frank discussion of the costs and benefits of the attempt to prohibit the use of marijuana," a topic at the heart of political debate. (Justice Stephen Breyer, often in accord with the case's dissenters, writes separately (and alone) to say the court should just declare that...