A Lesson for Young Journalists, Courtesy of Justice Kennedy
A high school newspaper in Manhattan recently added a new and prestigious editor to its staff: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. Adam Liptak of the New York Times reports:
It turns out that Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, widely regarded as one of the court’s most vigilant defenders of First Amendment values, had provided the newspaper, The Daltonian, with a lesson about journalistic independence. Justice Kennedy’s office had insisted on approving any article about a talk he gave to an assembly of Dalton high school students on Oct. 28.
Kathleen Arberg, the court’s public information officer, said Justice Kennedy’s office had made the request to make sure the quotations attributed to him were accurate.
The justice’s office received a draft of the proposed article on Monday and returned it to the newspaper the same day with “a couple of minor tweaks,” Ms. Arberg said. Quotations were “tidied up” to better reflect the meaning the justice had intended to convey, she said.
I’m all for being tidy — and, for all his faults, Kennedy has indeed been friendly to the First Amendment (if not to student speech rights in the “Bong Hits for Jesus” case, Morse v. Frederick) – but public figures don’t usually get to change a story to “better reflect” the intent of their words.
…Frank D. LoMonte, the executive director of the Student Press Law Center, questioned the school’s approach. “Obviously, in the professional world, it would be a nonstarter if a source demanded prior approval of coverage of a speech,” he said. Even at a high school publication, Mr. LoMonte said, the request for prepublication review sent the wrong message and failed to appreciate the sophistication of high school seniors.
While this is hardly a major scandal — and it’s not unusual for justices to exclude the press entirely from public appearances — Kennedy’s use of a judicial editor’s pen does support the general feeling that students don’t always get a fair shake when it comes to their constitutional rights. As I said about an unrelated case in which Cato filed a brief last week (quoting the landmark Tinker case), students shouldn’t have to “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech… at the schoolhouse gate” — especially when a man charged with protecting those rights comes to talk to them about the importance of law and liberty.
H/T: Jonathan Blanks
Filed under: Government and Politics; Law and Civil Liberties
The Right to Speak in Non-Government-Approved Ways
School officials denied student Pete Palmer the right to wear a shirt supporting John Edwards’s presidential campaign at his Dallas-area high school. They cited the district’s dress code, which prohibited messages on student clothing except for those that supported school activities or district-approved organizations, clubs or teams.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit agreed with the school district that this was a reasonable “time, place and manner” speech restriction. Applying the test from United States v. O’Brien, the court found that the dress code was content- and viewpoint-neutral, and served an important governmental purpose. Palmer now seeks Supreme Court review, citing seemingly contradictory precedents from the Second and Third Circuits and arguing that the regulation here flies in the face of the protection afforded to student speech by the famous case of Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District.
Cato, joined by the Institute for Justice, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the Christian Legal Society, and the National Association of Evangelicals, filed an amicus brief supporting Palmer’s petition and urging the continued use of Tinker. We argue that the Court should clarify its jurisprudence in this area to stop schools from applying broad restrictions in an attempt to avoid controversy and debate—and thereby threaten the very political and religious speech at the First Amendment’s core.
To prevent the chilling of student speech, the Court should solidify Tinker’s central tenet, reaffirming that so long as speech doesn’t “materially and substantially disrupt” the educational process, students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”
The case is Palmer v. Waxahachie Independent School District. The Court will be deciding early in 2010 whether to hear it.
Obama, International Law, and Free Speech
Stuart Taylor has a very good article this week about the Obama administration, international law, and free speech. This excerpt begins with a quote from Harold Koh, Obama’s top lawyer at the State Department:
“Our exceptional free-speech tradition can cause problems abroad, as, for example, may occur when hate speech is disseminated over the Internet.” The Supreme Court, suggested Koh — then a professor at Yale Law School — “can moderate these conflicts by applying more consistently the transnationalist approach to judicial interpretation” that he espouses.
Translation: Transnational law may sometimes trump the established interpretation of the First Amendment. This is the clear meaning of Koh’s writings, although he implied otherwise during his Senate confirmation hearing.
In my view, Obama should not take even a small step down the road toward bartering away our free-speech rights for the sake of international consensus. “Criticism of religion is the very measure of the guarantee of free speech,” as Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School, wrote in an October 19 USA Today op-ed.
Even European nations with much weaker free-speech traditions than ours were reportedly dismayed by the American cave-in to Islamic nations on “racial and religious stereotyping” and the rest.
Read the whole thing.
Some Thoughts on the New Surveillance
Last night I spoke at “The Little Idea,” a mini-lecture series launched in New York by Ari Melber of The Nation and now starting up here in D.C., on the incredibly civilized premise that, instead of some interminable panel that culminates in a series of audience monologues-disguised-as-questions, it’s much more appealing to have a speaker give a ten-minute spiel, sort of as a prompt for discussion, and then chat with the crowd over drinks.
I’d sketched out a rather longer version of my remarks in advance just to make sure I had my main ideas clear, and so I’ll post them here, as a sort of preview of a rather longer and more formal paper on 21st century surveillance and privacy that I’m working on. Since ten-minute talks don’t accommodate footnotes very well, I should note that I’m drawing for a lot of these ideas on the excellent work of legal scholars Lawrence Lessig and Daniel Solove (relevant papers at the links). Anyway, the expanded version of my talk after the jump:
Attorney General Tries to Silence School Choice Ad
This, finally, is too much: Eric Holder, Attorney General of the United States, walked up to former DC Councilman Kevin Chavous at an event and told him to pull an ad criticizing the administration for its opposition to the DC school voucher program. The Attorney General of the United States!
This is as outrageous and shameful as it is consistent with other administration hostilities toward free speech (see also here) and freedom of the press.
There is a deep revulsion to such behavior in this country. It is not a Republican or a Democratic revulsion, it is an American one. Obama administration officials seem not to understand that, but voters will help them get the message the next time they go to the polls.
Fact-checking Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey
I appeared on the CNN program Lou Dobbs Tonight last Thursday (Oct. 22) to discuss the medical marijuana issue and the drug war in general. There were two other guests: Peter Moskos from John Jay College and the organization Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) and Barry McCaffrey, retired General of the U.S. Army and former “Drug Czar” under President Bill Clinton.
I was really astonished by the doubletalk coming from McCaffrey. Watch the clip below and then I’ll explain two of the worst examples so you can come to your own conclusions about this guy.
Doubletalk: Example One:
Tim Lynch: “Some states have changed their marijuana laws to allow patients who are suffering from cancer and AIDS–people who want to use marijuana for medical reasons–they’re exempt from the law. But there’s a clash between the laws of the state governments and the federal government. The federal government has come in and said, ‘We’re going to threaten people with federal prosecution, bring them into federal court.’ And what the [new memo from the Obama Justice Department] does this week is change federal policy. Basically, Attorney General Eric Holder is saying, ‘Look, for people, genuine patients–people suffering from cancer, people suffering from AIDS–these people are now off limits to federal prosecutors.’ It’s a very small step in the direction of reform.”
Now comes Barry McCaffrey: “There is zero truth to the fact that the Drug Enforcement Administration or any other federal law enforcement ever threatened care-givers or individual patients. That’s fantasy!”
Zero truth? Fantasy? This report from USA Today tells the story of several patients who were harassed and threatened by federal agents. Excerpt: ”In August 2002, federal agents seized six plants from [Diane] Monson’s home and destroyed them.”
This report from the San Francisco Chronicle tells the story of Bryan Epis and Ed Rosenthal. Both men, in separate incidents, were raided, arrested, and prosecuted by federal officials. The feds called them “drug dealers.” When the cases came to trial, both men were eager to inform their juries about the actual circumstances surrounding their cases–but they were not allowed to convey those circumstances to jurors. Federal prosecutors insisted that information concerning the medical aspect of marijuana was “irrelevant.” Both men were convicted and jailed.
This report from the New York Times tells readers about the death of Peter McWilliams. The feds said he was a “drug dealer.” McWilliams also wanted to tell his story to a jury, but pled guilty when the judge told him he would not be allowed to inform the jury of his medical condition. Excerpt: “At his death, Mr. McWilliams was waiting to be sentenced in federal court after being convicted of having conspired to possess, manufacture and sell marijuana…. They pleaded guilty to the charge last year after United States District Judge George H. King ruled that they could not use California’s medical marijuana initiative, Proposition 215, as a defense, or even tell the jury of the initiative’s existence and their own medical conditions.” The late William F. Buckley wrote about McWilliams’ case here.
Imagine what Diane Monson, Bryan Epis, Ed Rosenthal, and Peter McWilliams (and others) would have thought had they seen a former top official claim that federal officials never threatened patients or caregivers?!
Filed under: General; Government and Politics; Law and Civil Liberties
One Nation Under Double Jeopardy
The Senate is about to vote on Defense Department funding with an expanded federal “hate crimes” bill. This well-intentioned piece of legislation threatens to make violations of the fundamental right against Double Jeopardy a routine practice, as federal courts will now have the power to re-prosecute defendants for what are traditionally state crimes.
The House removed language that the Senate put in place to ensure that the “hate crimes” provisions did not stretch to encompass free speech, threatening to attach criminal liability to core rights of free expression.
This expansion of federal jurisdiction guarantees that high profile cases will be retried until a guilty verdict is obtained to satisfy political factions. This politicization of justice will only harm our courts and our freedoms. The Senate should vote down this threat to the fundamental rights of all Americans.
Now for some quick background reading:
- “Welcome to the new age of Double Jeopardy.”
- Why hate-crime legislation won’t work.
- Podcast: How hate-crime legislation undermines federalism.
NYT: We Don’t Deserve First Amendment Protection!
I assume others have pointed this out already, but there’s something very odd about a Tuesday editorial in The New York Times arguing that campaign finance regulations that stifle the political speech of corporations must be upheld in the Citizens United case currently under consideration before the Supreme Court:
The question at the heart of one of the biggest Supreme Court cases this year is simple: What constitutional rights should corporations have? To us, as well as many legal scholars, former justices and, indeed, drafters of the Constitution, the answer is that their rights should be quite limited — far less than those of people.
In that case, surely it’s time to revisit some of the 20th century’s seminal free speech rulings. The idea that public figures cannot use libel law to squelch criticism unless they can prove an attack is intentionally or recklessly false, for instance, comes to us by way of New York Times Company v. Sullivan—a case in which the so-called “protected speech” was a paid advertisement run by a filthy corporation! And what about the celebrated Pentagon Papers case, in which the Court found that only in the most extreme cases can the government resort to “prior restraint” of speech? Why that’s New York Times Company v. United States. In both cases, of course, the speech in question had political significance—perhaps even the potential to affect elections. In the Pentagon Papers case, by the way, the counsel for the Times was famed First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams, who also argued Citizens United.
Don’t worry, though, it’s only corporations like The New York Times that will lose speech protections. If you, as a brave individual, want to say something controversial on your blog—though you’ll probably want to do it on a server you own personally, just in case—you’re totally in the clear. And if the federal government decides to sue, you’ll be totally free to use as much of your personal savings as you want to fight back.
‘We Don’t Put Our First Amendment Rights In the Hands of FEC Bureaucrats’
I (and several colleagues) have blogged before about Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the latest campaign finance case, which was argued this morning at the Supreme Court. The case is about much more than whether a corporation can release a movie about a political candidate during an election campaign. Indeed, it goes to the very heart of the First Amendment, which was specifically created to protect political speech—the kind most in danger of being censored by politicians looking to limit the appeal of threatening candidates and ideas.
After all, hard-hitting political speech is something the First Amendment’s authors experienced firsthand. They knew very well what they were doing in choosing free and vigorous debate over government-filtered pablum. Moreover, persons of modest means often pool their resources to speak through ideological associations like Citizens United. That speech too should not be silenced because of nebulous concerns about “level playing fields” and speculation over the “appearance of corruption.” The First Amendment simply does not permit the government to handicap speakers based on their wealth, or ration speech in a quixotic attempt to equalize public debate: Thankfully, we do not live in the world of Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron!
A few surprises came out of today’s hearing, but not regarding the ultimate outcome of this case. It is now starkly clear that the Court will rule 5-4 to strike down the FEC’s attempt to regulate the Hillary Clinton movie (and advertisements for it). Indeed, Solicitor General Elena Kagan — in her inaugural argument in any court — all but conceded that independent movies are not electioneering communications subject to campaign finance laws. And she reversed the government’s earlier position that even books could be banned if they expressly supported or opposed a candidate! (She went on to also reverse the government’s position on two other key points: whether nonprofit corporations (and perhaps small enterprises) could be treated differently than large for-profit business, and what the government’s compelling interest was in prohibiting corporations from using general treasury funds on independent political speech.)
Ted Olson, arguing for Citizens United, quickly recognized that he had his five votes, and so pushed for a broader opinion. That is, the larger — and more interesting — question is whether the Court will throw out altogether its 16-year-old proscription on corporations and unions spending their general treasury funds on political speech. Given the vehement opposition to campaign finance laws often expressed by Justices Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas, all eyes were on Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, in whose jurisprudence some have seen signs of judicial “minimalism.” The Chief Justice’s hostility to the government’s argument — “we don’t put our First Amendment rights in the hands of FEC bureaucrats” — and Justice Alito’s skepticism about the weight of the two precedents at issue leads me to believe that there’s a strong likelihood we’ll have a decision that sweeps aside yet another cornerstone of the speech-restricting campaign finance regime.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Law and Civil Liberties
Citizens United and Supreme Court Precedent
My old friend E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post writes that the Citizens United v. FEC rehearing on Wednesday is “A Test Case for Roberts.” Because, you see, Chief Justice John Roberts said in his confirmation hearings that “it is a jolt to the legal system when you overrule a precedent. Precedent plays an important role in promoting stability and evenhandedness. It is not enough — and the court has emphasized this on several occasions — it is not enough that you may think the prior decision was wrongly decided.”
Dionne says that if Roberts and the Court overturn the precedents that seem to point to banning a movie with a political agenda because it was produced by a nonprofit corporation, “he will unleash havoc in our political system and greatly undermine the legitimacy of the court he leads.”
I disagree with Dionne on the scope of the First Amendment’s protection of free speech. But I sort of admire him for staking out such a strong stand in favor of precedent and “settled expectations.” After all, a firm commitment to precedent can lead to some uncomfortable positions. Given the firmness of Dionne’s reliance on the importance of precedent and “settled expectations” to “the legitimacy of the court,” I assume he has opposed previous cases where the Court overturned settled law and its own precedent. Such as Brown v. Board of Education, which overturned a 58-year-old case, Plessy v. Ferguson. And Lawrence v. Texas, which overturned a 17-year-old precedent that had upheld state sodomy laws.
Or surely he does not mean that only precedents he approves of are deserving of respect and vital to the legitimacy of the court?
Filed under: Government and Politics; Law and Civil Liberties
Hillary: The Movie
The Supreme Court is soon to hear a case that may drastically roll back campaign finance regulation in the United States:
The case involves “Hillary: The Movie,” a mix of advocacy journalism and political commentary that is a relentlessly negative look at Mrs. Clinton’s character and career. The documentary was made by a conservative advocacy group called Citizens United, which lost a lawsuit against the Federal Election Commission seeking permission to distribute it on a video-on-demand service. The film is available on the Internet and on DVD. The issue was that the McCain-Feingold law bans corporate money being used for electioneering.
The right position for the Court is that McCain-Feingold, and all other campaign finance regulation, constitutes unconstitutional limitation on free speech. This means reversing the Court’s 1974 Buckley v. Valeo decision, which held that government limits on campaign spending were unconstitutional but limits on contributions were not.
This distinction is meaningless. If it is OK for a millionaire to spend his own money promoting his own campaign, why can he not give that money to someone else, who might be a more effective advocate for that millionaire’s views, so that this other person can run for office?
More broadly, campaign finance regulation is thought control: it takes a position on whether money should influence political outcomes. Whether or not one agrees, this is only one possible view, and freedom of speech is meant to prevent government from promoting or discouraging particular points of view.
It would be a brave step for Court to reverse Buckley, but it is the right thing to do.
For more background on the case, watch this:
C/P Libertarianism, from A to Z
600 Billion Data Points Per Day? It’s Time to Restore the Fourth Amendment
Jeff Jonas has published an important post: “Your Movements Speak for Themselves: Space-Time Travel Data is Analytic Super-Food!”
More than you probably realize, your mobile device is a digital sensor, creating records of your whereabouts and movements:
Mobile devices in America are generating something like 600 billion geo-spatially tagged transactions per day. Every call, text message, email and data transfer handled by your mobile device creates a transaction with your space-time coordinate (to roughly 60 meters accuracy if there are three cell towers in range), whether you have GPS or not. Got a Blackberry? Every few minutes, it sends a heartbeat, creating a transaction whether you are using the phone or not. If the device is GPS-enabled and you’re using a location-based service your location is accurate to somewhere between 10 and 30 meters. Using Wi-Fi? It is accurate below 10 meters.
The process of deploying this data to markedly improve our lives is underway. A friend of Jonas’ says that space-time travel data used to reveal traffic tie-ups shaves two to four hours off his commute each week. When it is put to full use, “the world we live in will fundamentally change. Organizations and citizens alike will operate with substantially more efficiency. There will be less carbon emissions, increased longevity, and fewer deaths.”
This progress is not without cost:
Read the rest of this post »
Filed under: Law and Civil Liberties; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
A Chance to Rethink How We Regulate Political Speech
At the March 24 argument in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the U.S. government argued that Section 203 of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (otherwise known as McCain-Feingold) permits the FEC to ban corporations, including ideological nonprofits like Citizens United, from making independent expenditures on films, books, or even “a sign held up in Lafayette Park.” The jurisprudential justification for this extraordinary and shockingly expansive view of the government’s power to suppress political speech traces to the Supreme Court’s 1990 decision in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce. In Austin, the Court held that Michigan had a compelling state interest in banning political speech funded with wealth accumulated using the corporate form. Though the Court contended that such speech, because it bears little correlation to public support for the political ideas expressed, constituted a “different type of corruption,” in reality it upheld Michigan’s statute as a “counterbalance” to the “distorting” and “unfair” influence corporate funds could have on the outcome of elections.
This relative-equality rationale—suppressing disfavored speakers to enhance the voice of other government-favored speakers—is antithetical to core First Amendment protections and elsewhere has been expressly rejected by the Court (in Buckley v. Valeo and, more recently, in Davis v. FEC). Accordingly, to decide Citizens United’s appeal, the Court ordered rebriefing and reargument on Austin’s continuing validity.
On Friday, Cato filed its brief, the second we’ve filed in the case. We argue that Austin, and the part of McConnell v. FEC that upheld Section 203’s facial validity, are not entitled to stare decisis deference and should thus be overturned. These relatively recent decisions are poorly reasoned, have engendered no reliance interests (no one relies on less freedom of speech), and have spawned an unworkable and irrational campaign finance system in which the government rations different levels of permissible political speech to otherwise equally situated speakers.
The case will be reargued September 9, in a special session about a month before the official start of the Court’s new term.
Here’s a Cato Institute video detailing some elements of the original Citizens United oral argument:
Filed under: Government and Politics; Law and Civil Liberties
The Roberts Revolution to Come
As I mentioned yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court surprised many people by ordering a reargument in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Specifically, the Court called for the parties to the case to address the question of overruling Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce.
The Court decided Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce in 1989. The state of Michigan had prohibited corporations from spending money on electoral speech. In the case in question, the Chamber of Commerce wished to pay for an advertisement backing a candidate for the House of Representatives. The Chamber took this action on its own and not in tandem with the candidate or his party. Paying for the ad was a felony under Michigan law.
A majority of the Court in 1989 said the Michigan law did not violate the First Amendment. However, the majority had a problem. Previous cases permitted limits on funding electoral speech only in pursuit of a compelling state interest: the prevention of quid pro quo corruption or its appearance. The Court had also ruled that independent spending by groups could not corrupt candidates.
So the majority needed a novel rationale for approving Michigan’s suppression of speech. The majority concluded that speech funded by corporations would distort the democratic process and that the state could prohibits such outlays to prevent harms done by “immense wealth.” In other words, the Austin majority tried to redefine “corruption” as “inequality of influence.” That revision had its own set of problems. Buckely v. Valeo, the Ur-decision in campaign finance, had excluded equality as a compelling state interest justifying regulation of campaign finance.
It is easy to see why the Buckley Court had rejected equality of influence as a reason for restricting political speech. Imagine Congress could prohibit speech that had “too much influence.” But how could that be determined? A majority in Congress would be tempted to suppress speech that threatened the power of that majority. Paradoxically, the equality rationale would strengthen those who already held power while vitiating representative government. The First Amendment tries to prevent that outcome.
In last year’s decision in Davis v. FEC, the Court again rejected the equality rationale for campaign finance laws. More and more the Austin decision is looking like bad law.
Justices Kennedy and Scalia, both current members of the Court, wrote dissents in Austin. Justice Thomas has called for Austin to be overruled in other contexts. Neither Justices Roberts nor Alito is likely to vote to uphold Austin (or the relevant parts of McConnell v. FEC for that matter). But it would seem that either or both of them were unwilling to strike down a precedent without a formal hearing. That hearing will come on September 9 with a decision expected by Thanksgiving.
Almost six years after the Court utterly refused to defend free speech in McConnell v. FEC, the Roberts Court may be ready to vindicate the First Amendment against its accusers in Congress and elsewhere.
Filed under: Cato Publications; Government and Politics; Law and Civil Liberties
Free Speech v. The Federal Election Commission
The so-called Citizens United case offers the Supreme Court a chance to severely curtail the free speech abuses of the Federal Election Commission. John Samples, Director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Representative Government, Institute for Justice Senior Attorney Steve Simpson and George Mason University law professor Allison Hayward weigh in. You can subscribe to Cato’s YouTube videos here and our Weekly Video podcast here.
Freedom of Speech Under Attack in Ecuador
Freedom of speech is coming under attack again in President Rafael Correa’s Ecuador. Last year Correa sent armed soldiers before dawn to some 200 private businesses, including three television stations, on the pretext that the owner (an unpopular businessman and critic of the government) had not paid money owed to the government.
It was never clear why the government had to place its own people in charge of running those businesses rather than go through the usual auditing or bankruptcy procedures. The result was to reduce criticism of the government at those TV stations and send a message to the rest of the media. At the time, Gabriela Calderón, Cato’s Ecuador-based editor of our Spanish language web site, www.elcato.org, hosted a weekly talk show program on CN3 TV station with two other market-liberal commentators. The station was one of the ones taken over, after which, Gabriela and her colleagues were told that from then on, their show had to “balanced” and include pro-government spokespersons. Gabriela and her colleagues quit in protest and the show went off the air.
Now Correa is enforcing a law that explicitly violates freedom of speech. Ecuador has been an officially dollarized country since 2000, before Correa came to power. Years of high oil prices have financed an explosion in government spending. With oil prices down, Correa’s populist project is quickly running out of money and people are speculating that he will de-dollarize Ecuador, allowing him to run the printing presses. However, it is illegal in Ecuador to suggest that the country will de-dollarize, as that would violate the law against spreading rumors of devaluation. The first victim has been Rómulo López Sabando, an attorney and long-time columnist for the Diario Expreso. On March 24 he wrote a column indicating that the government is planning to dedollarize. For committing that crime, the government ordered his arrest. He has been in hiding since.
It’s a very good bet that the government will de-dollarize this year, yet the Ecuadorian press has been silent on the matter. As the law victimizes the press and, more generally, Ecuadorian democracy, López remains in hiding and the arrest warrant still holds. Will Obama and other hemispheric leaders meeting at the summit of the Americas later this week denounce these abuses?
Why We Fight
Neal McCluskey’s classic Cato Policy Analysis, “Why We Fight: How Public Schools Cause Social Conflict,” is vindicated once again by the tiff over whether a porn film will be screened on the University of Maryland campus.
At this writing, students intend to go ahead with a showing of “Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge” despite threats from a state senator to withhold funding for the university if the film is screened.
Many people object to porn for legitimate reasons. The question is whether the state should weigh in on the subject, pitting the moral views of some against the speech rights of others.
Says McCluskey:
Throughout American history, public schooling has produced political disputes, animosity, and sometimes even bloodshed between diverse people. Such clashes are inevitable in government-run schooling because all Americans are required to support the public schools, but only those with the most political power control them.
Hopefully, the students are learning the relevant free-speech lesson from this episode: Government funds always come with strings, including strings that threaten free speech.
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