Bong Hitz 4 Jesus

It’s the first day of classes, so David Wittenberg thinks he can still get away with a column about stuff that happened over the summer.

Bong Hitz 4 Jesus. There. I just said it. How do you like me now, Supreme Court?

If Justice Stevens had wanted to do his dissent properly, he would have told Sarah Silverman’s version of The Aristocrats from the bench. On the same day that the Supreme Court protected Corporate America’s right to muck up our elections, it delivered a sucker punch — the kind with a roll of pennies squeezed in its balled-up fist — to high school students’ sacred right to say stupid stuff. I mean what I said there. High school kids ought to have a right to say stupid stuff.

This summer, the Supreme Court ruled against an Alaska high school student who had sued his school after being suspended for flying a banner that said “Bong Hitz 4 Jesus” during a class trip to watch the Olympic Torch go by. The majority said that because the message promoted drug use, and wasn’t, in their thinking, overtly political, the school had the right to limit the student’s right to free speech.

But if we have a right to free speech, then we have a right to free speech, and it means protecting all speech — not just the kinds of speech we think are important.

In John F. Kennedy’s speech to the Houston ministers during the 1960 campaign, he made the case for freedom of religion much the same way. “Today,” he said, “the fingers may be pointed at me, at Catholics. But it has been in the past and it may be in the future pointed at Jews, Unitarians, Baptists or anybody else.” Like religion, we protect others’ speech on principle — but also because, in doing so, we protect our own speech. Howard Stern and Habermas are part of the same system. Tom Paine owes as much to Larry Flint as Larry Flint owes to Tom Paine.

Here’s the deal: I hate Illinois Nazis, right? But just think about this: We live in a country that loves free speech so much it lets Nazis march through Skokie, and we can’t let some high school freak from Alaska — who clearly has nothing better to do — throw up some stupid banner?

Chief Justice Roberts thinks high school kids have less of a right to joke about doobies or make fart noises than Nazis have to goose-step past Grandma’s house. As the famous Blues Brothers line goes, I hate Illinois Nazis. But I love the fact that we let them march because, in theory, it means that everyone else’s speech is protected as a result.

“That tight-ass motherf$#%er smoked more doobies than Chong,” said a partner for a high-powered New York corporate firm who went to law school with Roberts.

That’s not a real quote. But I can say it, because it’s satire and because Roberts is a public figure, and get clean away. While the United Kingdom — yes, the same bunch of pasty-faced tea-drinkers we kicked out 231 years ago — was busy protecting its right to honor newly-knighted Sir Salman Rushdie’s right to say whatever damn well he pleased without getting fatwa-ed by Islamo-fascists, the Roberts Court — packed tighter than a blunt with Bush and Reagan appointees — was busy eroding our civil liberties here on the sinister side of the pond. Let me say that in a way that a soundbite with the mind of a five-year-old could understand: The Supreme Court hates freedom.

The Court is packed with folks who want to make sure that the same yutzes who have power now keep it, who want government to stay out of their boardrooms and in your bedrooms. If you don’t believe that one, just look at the decision striking down state laws banning sodomy: it was 5-4. If Stevens, or anybody else, croaks or retires, Bush gets another appointment and the curtain really comes down. Conservative jurists hate the Warren Court for what they see as the excesses of a chief justice who tried to legislate from the bench. But the Warren Court’s decisions are practically taken for granted today. If the conservatives get another vote on the Court, the rights established in the ’60s are in jeopardy. Forget the right to speak out: the right to remain silent is in just as dire straits.

In the mean time, hear this: You have the right to act like an idiot. Churchill said, “The best argument against democracy is five minutes spent with the average voter.” But the credence democracy gives to common men and commoner statements is what makes it beautiful. The system might be noxious, inefficient, or any other name you’d like to call it, but isn’t that the way it was set up? Lady Liberty is no poised debutante; she’s a hot mess, and that’s the way we like her. Which leads me to this: When it comes to the frothy bubbling mess at the center of America’s melting pot, how are we supposed to know whether to despise or love what we see? Like big cities, major league ballparks and tropical rainforests, isn’t the mess, the noise, the chaos, the raw lurid bruising reality of American politics somehow its most endearing quality? Think about that.

David Wittenberg is a Senior Editor at The Sun. He can be contacted at daw49@cornell.edu [1]. The Scoop will appear Thursdays this semester.