Welcome to a fresh and new passion
blog: “Cruel and Unusual”, a ten part stroll through the Bill of Rights, one of the
founding documents of our American ideals regarding personal privilege and the “oppressive”
government that abridges those privileges. To many of you, this blog might come
off as a nauseating flashback to a high school government class. Don’t worry –
I plan on selecting some of the most interesting cases, one for each amendment,
and reviewing the Supreme Court’s application of the amendment. I hope you
stick along for the ride.
Where else would we start then
with the First Amendment? Guaranteeing that Congress will not legislate
prohibiting a litany of practices, including religion, speech, press, assembly,
and petitioning, this first amendment is the one most frequently quoted by
fourth graders trying to get away with swearing.
Beyond a shadow of a doubt, the
case that first comes to my mind when analyzing the first amendment would be
Bethel School District No. 403 v. Fraser. Argued in 1986, this case is both a
prime example of the application of the First Amendment and an entertaining
court case for anyone who is as immature as the average teenager – in this
case, Matthew Fraser.
Fraser, a senior at Bethel High
School in Washington, nominated a classmate, Jeff Kuhlman, for a student
government position. At an assembly with the entire school present (some 600
students, including many innocent little freshman), Fraser gave a speech that
included the following bits of gold:
- “I know a man who is firm. He’s firm in his pants, he’s firm in his shirt, his character is firm…but most of all, his belief in you, the students of Bethel, is firm.”
- “Kuhlman is a man who takes his point and pounds it in…he’ll take an issue and nail it to the wall…he drives hard, pushing and pushing until finally he succeeds.”
- “Jeff is a man who will go to the very end – even the climax, for each and every one of you.”
Evidently, school administrators
were less than pleased with Bethel’s innuendo riddled speech. The high school
punished (not like that) Fraser for his breaking of Bethel’s rule against “interfering
with the educational process … including the use of obscene or profane language”.
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| Fraser in front of his school - Glogster |
Clearly, Fraser broke this rule.
The constitutional question, however, stems from whether or not a school
(particularly a public school, thereby affiliated with the government) is able
to discipline a student for speech, or is it a violation of the First
Amendment.
Contrary to the decision made
years earlier in Tinker (not sure how
the Warren court took that name seriously), the court did not support the
student’s right to expression, rather asserting that Fraser’s lewd speech
crippled the school’s ability to “teach fundamental values”. Chief Justice Burger
did admit that the First Amendment may protect an adult’s right to make such
offensive comments (not that many adults would be so ridiculously immature),
but that children in a public school cannot be guaranteed the same protection
under the law.
To summarize, don’t say stupid
stuff in school. Public school is already a cesspool of corruption in its own
right – if you’re a student, you might not be guaranteed the rights that the
First Amendment outlines when in an educational setting.
