Last September, I  posted about the pathetic decision in the Avery Doninger case, where a United States District Judge in Connecticut who held that “douchebag”, posted about school officials by a student on her website, was sufficiently “vulgar” that it warranted the student being denied the right to run for student government office.

Judge Mark Kravitz, sitting high on the bench in fine black robes, then executed the duties of his office in exemplary fashion.

The court blithely deferred to the school administration, holding that who was he, a federal judge, to pass on the question of the propriety of punishment imposed upon an American by a government official.  Didn’t anyone ever give him the judge handbook?  If not a federal judge, then who?

The decision is here.  Yes, the irony of a punishment for the exercise of speech being the inability to seek election to a position in government (you know, working from within the system as opposed to, say, anarchy) has not gone unnoticed.

The case was argued before the Second Circuit this week.  According to the Hartford Courant, Avery’s lawyer, Jon L. Schoenhorn, argued

that the Internet should not give schools more cause to regulate off-campus speech. “It’s just a bigger soapbox,” he said

At the polar extreme, the School District’s lawyer, Thomas R. Gerarde, countered:

the Internet has fundamentally changed students’ ability to communicate, allowing them to reach hundreds of people at a time. If a student leader makes offensive comments about the school on the Internet, the school should have the right to act.

 “We shouldn’t be required to just swallow it,” he said.

While I don’t appreciate the “swallow it” image, I find more offensive the notion that schools, teaching all about the greater glory of American history year after year, have an overarching lesson plan that teaches students that if they are critical of petty governmental tyrants, they will get beaten to a pulp.  Which one is the real America?

Is the problem so simple that schools are administered by frightened grocery clerks, incapable of reasoning their way through disagreements with students?  When their final answer is, “because I said so,” they demand that the law either prohibit students from smart-mouthing back or allow them to punish, without oversight or constraint, the student for her insolence?

The Circuit panel offered some interesting words from the bench:

Gerarde said speech off campus can affect the school. But Judge Sonia Sotomayor challenged his argument, noting that “Pedagogical rights can’t supersede the rights of students off campus to have First Amendment rights.”

“If students are free to say offensive things about administrators on their home computers, chaos will rule,” Judge Loretta Preska told Schoenhorn.

Chaos?  That nasty offshoot of the free flow of ideas that will confuse and baffle young minds?  That seems a bit strong. 

But the district’s lawyer nailed down his position with this statement:

Gerarde posed another situation: What if a class president drove a mile off campus and e-mailed vulgar comments about the principal to hundreds of students? Should the student be able to say he’s off campus and the school can’t do anything about it? “That’s wrong,” Gerarde said.

Sticks and stones, baby.  The bottom line is that the school can’t imagine a world where they aren’t in ultimate control of their students, their words, bodies and thoughts.  It would be just horrible, if you’re a grocery clerk.