AMERICA:When a high school senior heard that the torch for the 2002 Winter Olympics was passing through his home town of Juneau, Alaska, he saw a chance to make a point, writes Denis Staunton.
As Joseph Frederick's lawyer acknowledged this week, the 18-year-old was also hoping to appear on television when he unfurled a three-metre banner across the street from his school.
The banner read "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" and when principal Deborah Morse saw it, she ran across the street and tore it down.
Later that day, a furious Morse suspended Frederick from school for five days, telling him it was unacceptable to promote drug use to other school pupils. When he quoted Thomas Jefferson to the effect that "speech limited is speech lost" Morse responded: "You've just earned another five-day suspension".
Claiming that his banner was a "free speech experiment", Frederick filed a lawsuit against Morse, on the basis that she had violated his first amendment right to free speech. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) supported Frederick and the case reached the supreme court this week, where the nine justices had to decode the banner and determine if it was protected by the constitution.
A bong, as some older readers may recall, is a water pipe used to smoke marijuana and a hit is an inhalation from such a pipe.
"The words 'bong hits' are slang that would have a particular characteristic of getting across to other students," a lawyer for Morse told the court.
Frederick claimed that schoolchildren had established their right to free speech in 1969, when the supreme court ruled in Tinker v Des Moines that a 13-year-old and a 15-year-old were entitled to wear black armbands to school in protest against the Vietnam War.
In that ruling, Justice Abe Fortas declared that students do not "shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate".
Subsequent rulings have established that a T-shirt proclaiming "Co-ed Naked Band: Do it to the Rhythm" is protected by the constitution, but one declaring: "Abortion is Homicide. You will not mock my God" is not.
A court has, however, determined that public school students can wear a T-shirt that says "Homosexuality is a sin! Islam is a lie! Abortion is murder!" If Frederick's banner was a statement promoting drug use, it might also be seen as disrespectful to Jesus but, instead of condemning the Alaskan student, Christian groups have supported him.
Bruce Hausknecht, judicial analyst for Focus on the Family Action, said it was important that schools strike a proper balance between the students' rights and school officials' interests in a safe learning environment.
"While Christians generally support the right of schools to maintain discipline, there has been a disturbing trend in recent years of schools prohibiting only Christian speech, while allowing other speech antithetical to Christian belief," he said.
Kelly Shackelford, chief counsel of the Liberty Legal Institute, said a ruling in favour of Frederick would make it very difficult for school officials to censor religious expression.
"If he can say something as outrageous as what he said, then it's going to be a lot harder to censor some kid for sharing his beliefs or having his religious beliefs in an assignment," she said. Part of the supreme court's difficulty is that nobody can say for sure what "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" actually means. Kenneth Starr, who pursued Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair and is representing the school in the Frederick case, acknowledged that allowing schools to ban speech that promotes illegal activity could raise "interesting hypothetical questions" about the civil disobedience movement of Martin Luther King and conscientious objectors to war.
Hausknecht says that regardless of the banner's meaning, Frederick must win. "Even though we don't approve (or even understand) the message, we as Christians do not want to see our first amendment rights eroded any further," he said.