"Bong Hits 4 Jesus": Strange bedfellows justifiably rally behind the First Amendment.

[Liberty4All]

Around six years ago, I learned about the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. It is an indispensible and phenomenal organization that stands up for students and professors against such unjust academic administrative oppression of expression as the ultimately reversed 1989 probation of a student at Tufts (my undergrad alma mater) for distributing an offensive, abhorrent, and sophomoric t-shirt with fifteen alleged reasons why beer was better than women at Tufts. At the time, I immediately wrote Tufts' dean of student affairs about my revulsion over this curtailment of this student's free expression rights, only to receive a trite -- but polite (so as to avoid being offensive to me, of course, where a student had been disciplined for being offensive) -- reply asserting that reasonable time, place and manner restrictions on expression were acceptable, and hoping that I still was happy I attended Tufts (which I was and still am, it having been a critical mind, humor and experience-expanding watershed where students and professors of all sorts of viewpoint stripes could honestly discuss and debate their views (or just hike the White Mountains without discussing their political views) and then drink beer together (or do both at the same time), which is why I was so saddened that this beer t-shirt discipline had ever taken place). I was delighted to later learn that the FIRE was on the same page with me on this t-shirt matter.

See the rest of this article here: "Bong Hits 4 Jesus": Strange bedfellows justifiably rally behind the First Amendment. - UNDERDOG BLOG - by M&K's Criminal Defense and Individual Rights Lawyers (http://markskatz.com/justiceblog/archives/448-Bong-Hits-4-Jesus-Strange-bedfellows-justifiably-rally-behind-the-First-Amendment..html)