Liberal Arts Major
A girl (I assume it's a girl; I don't really pay attention to those details) who was elected to some secretarial position in her school has been refused the position on account of the fact that she'd slandered school officials in some blog. She sued the district or school or somesuch, and the judge gave her a well-deserved "fuck you", ruling in the school or district's favor. All this does is protect the right of private bodies (and, of course, socialist tentacles masquerading as private bodies) to maintain an internal hierarchy according to their own standards. The girl wasn't denied her right to free speech - that's ridiculous; she simply did not meet the all the requirements for the secretarial position.
If the girl were still the age of compulsory school attendance and she had been suspended or denied something more crucial to the everyday student's life than the 'right' to run in class elections, the issue would be different. But once you can legally choose to drop out of school, you're a member of the school system by choice, and in that case the system arguably has the right to set rules for behavior at any time and any place as a condition for keeping that 'full membership'.
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~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Editor
This is especially troubling when it applies to the lol internet - had she made this statement somewhere on school grounds, it might be different, but the internet does not count as part of school, no matter how many technicalities the district tries to pull up to make it so. What she did violated no rule, and punishing her for it is absolutely outrageous.
And based on what I know of school officials (more than I'd like to), whatever she called whoever she called it, they probably deserved it.
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"Allow ME to interject: TFN does not die immediately because you get banned. Your banning would unleash a disease that would slowly eat TFN from the inside until your reinstatement or the site's eventual, decidedly painful death." ~Ogor, to me
Liberal Arts Major
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~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Editor
Mind you, if she were barred from running for other reasons, this would be different. The aforementioned drug addiction would be a good reason. This is:
1. Something she said.
2. Something she said while not at school.
3. Something she said on the internet.
Any one of these points should be enough to dismiss the district's case. When all three come together, it means that the district just needs to shut the hell up and worry about bigger problems.
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"Allow ME to interject: TFN does not die immediately because you get banned. Your banning would unleash a disease that would slowly eat TFN from the inside until your reinstatement or the site's eventual, decidedly painful death." ~Ogor, to me
Liberal Arts Major
Here is where you're wrong. Student body offices (secretary, president, etc.) are not a system created and organized by the students by their own authority. The school creates those positions in order to give certain students the illusion that they matter, or what have you. These positions are always under the administration's regulation - school administrators always have the final say in who gets elected, who can run, and so on.
If the school were trying to bar her from running for secretary in some private collective of students, that would obviously be a matter that doesn't come under the school's power. But the way it's set up, a ruling in the girl's favor basically states that private groups have no legal right to set their own standards for membership and privileges within the group unless those standards are restricted solely to the actions of members within that group. For instance, under this precedent, I could not legally ban somebody from TFN for advocating genocide against, say, Mexicans, as long as they were not advocating genocide on these message boards.
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~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Editor
To use your own example (and ignoring for a moment that schools and internet message boards are completely different), a ruling in the girl's favor would say that you can:
1) Ban someone from TFN for anything they say on TFN. Anything.
2) CanNOT ban someone from TFN for saying anything anywhere else on the internet.
Of course, you could legally ban someone from TFN for any reason at all. But whether it's morally acceptable or even justifiable at all to do so is a different matter.
There is no doubt in my mind that schools CAN do what they did. They just shouldn't, because it imposes a kind of environment where students cannot speak freely, even outside of school, for fear of getting punished or having their "rights" revoked.
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"Allow ME to interject: TFN does not die immediately because you get banned. Your banning would unleash a disease that would slowly eat TFN from the inside until your reinstatement or the site's eventual, decidedly painful death." ~Ogor, to me
Juggernaut, bitch.
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Burgess [Z?] http://blog.myspace.com/burgess51
I smell like smoke because I have walked through fire.
Legend
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Now! This is it! Now is the time to choose! Die and be free of pain or live and fight your sorrow! Now is the time to shape your stories! Your fate is in your hands! - Auron (FFX)
Liberal Arts Major
As far as legal proceedings are concerned, a ruling granting sweeping "free speech" rights to students would act as a precedent for all other trials of that sort. That the school is run by the state is only a nominal difference: it's still organized like a private body. The sort of legal atmosphere that would grant a ruling in the girl's favor would be hard-pressed to feel outrage over this but tolerate, say, a person getting kicked out of a private school because of something he didn't do on campus. Idiots are already fond of telling everybody not to violate their right to free speech - just wait until they get lawyers.
1) Ban someone from TFN for anything they say on TFN. Anything.
2) CanNOT ban someone from TFN for saying anything anywhere else on the internet.
This is what I said.
Of course, you could legally ban someone from TFN for any reason at all.
The point is that something like that could potentially be made a target for lawsuits, and so it's good to avoid making exceptions for the school on the basis that it's run by the state. Legal precedent is binding to the point that this entire case would have probably been thrown out if not for a Supreme Court case that said students have some vague form of immunity from retribution for their actions on the part of a public school.
They just shouldn't, because it imposes a kind of environment where students cannot speak freely, even outside of school, for fear of getting punished or having their "rights" revoked.
Perhaps this is just because I have a different view of school's role in a person's life, but I personally find no problem with the school's actions. Once you reach the age where you can legally stop going to school, it's a convenience to remain in the system, not a prerogative, and if you want to take full advantage of that, you shouldn't do anything that could conceivably make that convenience less pleasant - like put your distaste for the administration in print.
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~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu