Hello Chairboy,
Originally posted by Chairboy
So Seagoon, what's your opinion on this specific ruling?
My opinion is that I'm glad I'm not a Supreme Court Justice and didn't have to make the decision.
I sense my viewpoint on this is not going to make either side in the argument happy but for what it's worth, here it is. In the interests of full disclosure, first let me tell you that I'm probably one of the few people out there who was more saddened by the fact that the message was blasphemous and mocked Christ, than that it promoted smoking pot - I certainly know which one of those Scripture tells us God is more concerned with. Lest you think I have a "holier than thou " attitude, please keep in mind that I've done both those things and probably did them for far longer and more seriously than the silly teens who unfurled the banner.
It seems to me that Our "law" in this area is becoming hopelessly arbitrary, hypocritical, and confusing especially to the very teens whose behavior it seeks to regulate.
Let me try to illustrate what I mean with two illustrations from my own high school days. While we were away on a high school Geology trip in Arizona two of the guys got busted for buying a number of soft-core porn magazines (which they kindly shared with the rest of us) they were both suspended for a couple of days. Even at that early age, this made no sense to me. In English we were reading Alice Walker's
The Color Purple which actually starts with a graphic and shocking description of the rape of a 14 year old girl including the use of the T & P words. It also occurred to us that the magazines were less graphic than our "human sexuality" classes (put of the "health" curriculum) which assumed that we would already be seeing the actual versions of what was covered in the magazines and putting our new found knowledge of human reproduction to use. As another example while we had a "no shirts without collars" rule that eliminated the problem with offensive slogans on T-Shirts, one of the boys managed to find a collared Tennis Shirt that had a small stitched Marijuana leaf where the Izod Crocodile would normally go. Within a week all of us were rushing out to buy them and in no time at all the administration "cottoned on" and banned them. Again, in English class our ex-hippy faculty were having us read books like "Naked Lunch" and "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" that both promoted recreational drug use (additionally Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing..." was on the elective reading list). I think had anyone suggested removing them from the library or the reading list both faculty and administration would have gone berserk screaming about "fascism" and "censorship." So books advocating drug use were fine, but polo shirts that did the same in a far more understated manner were not.
You see we have come to the point where we are attempting to enforce rules without any sort of coherent ethical foundation. Therefore they are rules suspended entirely in thin air. Where is the sense of telling children they can't have pornography, but then teach them a course with graphic sexual content covering every deviation in the book, with illustrations and examples, and then tell them I expect they'll be doing what I'm teaching them about?
At one time in American history, we didn't have to worry about teen-aged school kids unfurling a banner like that at a public event, and it had nothing to do with "free speech" laws. It had far more to do with the fact that as a society we taught them in an unambiguous way that such things were
immoral and a disgrace. It would have been an action that would have brought shame and approbrium on them and their parents, and probably would have led to a trip to the woodshed in most cases. Merely telling them they can't have their banner during school sanctioned events for some reason (but its ok to write it in English class or have it published in a magazine, but heaven help you if you stand in public with the same message? Where is the sense in that?) is absurd. If we teach them Nihilism, why should we be offended when they act in a Nihilistic fashion. The oddity is that we expect our children to act in a "moral" fashion when we have neither taught them to do so, or given them any reason why they should.
So Chair, to me this isn't about Free Speech, its about a society that has ceased to cohere and is increasingly balkanized, decadent, self-destructive, hypocritical, and incoherent. I can't make any sense of our supposed "free-speech" laws, they seem utterly arbitrary to me at this point. All I know is that I'm preaching essentially the same gospel message that Christ's church was commissioned to preach almost 2000 years ago and which has been heard in Reformed pulpits in America for over three hundred years, but that same message will probably eventually get me thrown in jail within the next tow decades. The funny thing is, its not the kids and members in my church who are likely to unfurl pro-drug banners or commit actual "hate crimes." But I'm still apparently the big problem.
- SEAGOON
