Alongside this year's historic and landmark cases over rights of habeas corpus, lethal injection and abortion, the Supreme Court has elected to hear a case of similar national import: Joseph Frederick's trouble over his sign, "Bong Hits 4 Jesus."
The 18-year-old high school student was suspended after holding up a large banner promoting smoking weed for Jesus during the Olympic Torch run through Juneau, Alaska in 2002.
According to a Dec. 1 Associated Press article, the school enforced the punishment after deciding that Frederick's message was advocating use of illegal drugs, and had "violated the school's policy of promoting illegal substances at a school-sanctioned event."
An appeals court later overturned the decision in favor of Frederick's civil rights, but the Juneau School Board is taking it to the nine justices.
They even hired Kenneth Starr, famed attorney and prosecutor of ex-President Bill Clinton's Lewinsky fiasco, who took the case pro-bono.
Give me a break.
I'd like to take the time now to call to mind what's known as the First Amendment, or a notorious but barely understood constitutional facet that seems to become increasingly nonexistent in today's world concerned with political correctness and making everybody feel warm and fuzzy inside.
The facts of the case are simple: The kid wasn't on school property, the message wasn't a sexual innuendo nor was it obscene, and just like I and my fellow columnists do everyday in this 700-word venue, he was merely expressing his own opinion.
I bet half the audience in Juneau didn't even know what a bong is.
When anti-abortion activists showcase hundred-foot billboards of bloody, mangled fetuses, there's really no way to avoid a glimpse, whether you want to or not.
When anti-gay extremists camp outside Willard and loudly bash homosexuals for hours, we have no choice but to listen to their ludicrous rants and walk by, leaving the fanatics unscathed.
So when a teenager holds up a sign that talks about smoking weed, read it, hate it or love it, and then get on with your life.
Express your opinion about his message if you'd like, but don't deny him the opportunity to express his. If Frederick believes that a good toke is the best way to celebrate the Lord, then who is the Juneau School Board to argue? Maybe on school property they have a say, but not when it is lauded in public streets.
Independent student-run publications, like The Daily Collegian, serve the same purposes that national news organizations do- to ensure that the public connects with its leaders and itself in a productive, socially progressive way. Free speech, like this Opinion Page, is crucial to this endeavor.
In a sense, being part of a democracy requires sacrifice. In order to wear what you want or say what you want, you've got to put up with someone else who is allowed to do the same thing. The school board, like so many bureaucratic institutions of authority, has obviously nothing better to do than waste its time and money fighting one of its students who was simply invoking his rights as an American and a high schooler.
If the school board wins the case, the Court will have plunked us right at the top of a very slippery slope, one in which I can foresee all sorts of free speech codes and regulations that hinder the student and public voice to the extent where all that's left to fill the empty void is utter administrative control, propaganda and agenda promotion.
Good for Frederick for fighting this all the way. I hope he wins.
And I hope that we all will learn a lesson from his plight - that passive and peaceful free speech is something to champion, nothing to take for granted and certainly nothing to be suspended over.
The moral of the story: the next time someone holds up a sign proclaiming "Crack rocks for Muhammad," laugh a little, and then just let it slide.
The Supreme Court has bigger things to worry about.
