When the TV cameras started rolling, Joseph Frederick, a senior at the high school who hadn't yet attended that day, unfurled for viewers a 14-foot banner on the side of the street, which read "BONG HITS 4 JESUS."

Principal Morse, who was there along with the students she had released, saw the banner and grabbed it from Frederick, telling him that he was suspended for violating the school's anti-drug policy. Frederick says that when he quoted Thomas Jefferson to her in defense of his right to free speech, Morse doubled the suspension period to ten days.

Eventually the dispute hiked all the way to a federal appeals court, where it was unanimously decided in Frederick's favor. But now the school district has attracted former Whitewater Independent Counsel Ken Starr to handle their case on final appeal, and the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments for both sides on March 19 of this year.

Unexpectedly, Frederick, who now teaches English in China, has gained the support of several religious and anti-drug groups. They've decided that if schools can suppress talk about drugs, they can also censor religious expression and drug-trashing talk that should be protected by the First Amendment.

By one precedent, the Supreme Court has held that students don't leave their rights to free speech "at the schoolhouse gate." But according to the same precedent, school administrators do have some authority to suppress expression which disrupts the educational mission, such as inciting to riot or violate sex taboos.

"Policies that keep pro-drug messages out of the school environment reflect common sense," says Starr. School rules which prohibit drug advocacy, applied to on- and off-campus activity, "are commonplace throughout the country," he claims.

Starr, who was responsible for wasting millions of dollars prosecuting the Whitewater hogwash against then-President Clinton, has now sealed his reputation in history as the lawyer with the bright-sounding name who was famously a dull thud twice before the bar.

Schools have no right to stifle the free speech of students off-campus, whether or not school rules which try to do so are "commonplace." And school officials in this case even admitted that Principal Morse was not so much concerned about possible disruption (there was none) as about the fact that the message on Frederick's banner mocked school policy about drug use.

Yet BONG HITS 4 JESUS is clearly more nonsensical than provocative, and obviously protected speech under the First Amendment; especially when expressed as it was on a public street, in an orderly fashion, by a student entitled to disagree with the attitudes of his school's administration.

Mr. Starr and his nutty buddies may not want pro-drug messages in school, and indeed most schools do not promote drug use. Thus, it makes far more solid common sense to honor and preserve the First Amendment - to show students how highly we value free speech - than to worry about Jesus freely getting high, or suggesting that he gets high at all, though these days he may be sorely tempted.

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Copyright 2007 Metropolitan Community College