DesertFox
06-29-2007, 09:10 PM
Jonah Goldberg
Jonah is in great form today
There are few areas where I think common sense is more sorely lacking than in our public debates over free speech, and there’s no better proof than two recent Supreme Court decisions. ...
For a long time, we concluded the best way to protect political speech was to defend other forms of expression — commercial, artistic, and just plain wacky — so as to make sure that our core right to political speech was kept safe. Like establishing outposts in hostile territory, we safeguarded the outer boundaries of acceptable expression to keep the more important home fire of political speech burning freely. That’s why in the 1960s and 1970s, all sorts of stuff — pornography, strip clubs, etc, — was deregulated by the Supreme Court on the grounds that this was now legitimate “expression” of some sort.
Also, in 1969, the Supreme Court ruled in Tinker v. Des Moines, that students don’t “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”
This always struck me as preposterous. Of course students shed some of their rights at the schoolhouse gate. That’s the whole idea behind the concept of in loco parentis. Teachers and administrators get to act like your parents while you’re at school. And parents are not required to respect the constitutional rights of their kids. Tell me, do hall-pass requirements restrict the First Amendment right of free assembly? Don’t many of the same people who claim that you have free-speech rights in public schools also insist that you don’t have the right to pray in them?
More (http://author.nationalreview.com/latest/?q=MjE5NQ==)
Jonah is in great form today
There are few areas where I think common sense is more sorely lacking than in our public debates over free speech, and there’s no better proof than two recent Supreme Court decisions. ...
For a long time, we concluded the best way to protect political speech was to defend other forms of expression — commercial, artistic, and just plain wacky — so as to make sure that our core right to political speech was kept safe. Like establishing outposts in hostile territory, we safeguarded the outer boundaries of acceptable expression to keep the more important home fire of political speech burning freely. That’s why in the 1960s and 1970s, all sorts of stuff — pornography, strip clubs, etc, — was deregulated by the Supreme Court on the grounds that this was now legitimate “expression” of some sort.
Also, in 1969, the Supreme Court ruled in Tinker v. Des Moines, that students don’t “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”
This always struck me as preposterous. Of course students shed some of their rights at the schoolhouse gate. That’s the whole idea behind the concept of in loco parentis. Teachers and administrators get to act like your parents while you’re at school. And parents are not required to respect the constitutional rights of their kids. Tell me, do hall-pass requirements restrict the First Amendment right of free assembly? Don’t many of the same people who claim that you have free-speech rights in public schools also insist that you don’t have the right to pray in them?
More (http://author.nationalreview.com/latest/?q=MjE5NQ==)