Bong Hits for Jesus?

Joseph Frederick was an 18-year-old senior at Juneau-Douglas High School , in Alaska , in January 2002. One morning that month a “Winter Olympics Torch Relay” was passing through town. The event was sponsored by corporations. Students were released from school to see it. Frederick never made it to school. He got stuck in the snow. But he did make it to a sidewalk across from school by the time the torch was passing through. When television cameras caught a glimpse of him and his friends, he unfurled a banner that read, “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.” The school principal crossed the street, grabbed Frederick ’s banner, destroyed it destruction of property, anyone? and suspended him for 10 days.



“What about the Bill of Rights and freedom of speech?” Frederick asked her. Forget it, the principal replied, saying the banner “violated the policy against displaying offensive material, including material that advertises or promotes use of illegal drugs.” But the banner hadn’t been displayed on school property.


Even if he wasn’t, who’s the school, who’s anyone, to judge what he was doing and why so long as he’d done nothing to impede school business? If anything, it was the torch-passing that had disrupted school, and the exposure of students to soft-drink propaganda and products that was the more questionable message that day: Pound for pound, soft drinks wreck the health of far more Americans, children included, than marijuana does.

Freedom of speech should be inforced no matter what. Its in the constitution..