Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Bong Hits for Whom?

I think the most extraordinary thing about Morse v. Frederick is not that the kid got five days for a banner urging "Bong Hits for Jesus," but that he got an extra five days for quoting Thomas Jefferson.

Evidently he quoted Jefferson saying "speech limited is speech lost" (link).

I wonder what the Juneau School District Protocol would have prescribed if he had uttered this other Jefferson fave (link):
I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever.

Fn.:I was going to use "the tree of liberty must be watered by the blood of tyrants," which I remember using in a college public speaking class 40 years ago. Turns out he didn't quite say it; he was quoting somebody else. Or at any rate, here's Bartleby :

THOMAS JEFFERSON, letter to William Stephens Smith, November 13, 1787.—The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd, vol. 12, p. 356 (1955).

A related idea was later expressed by Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac in a speech to the French national assembly, January 16, 1793: “L’arbre de la liberté… croît lorsqu’il est arrosé du sang de toute espèce de tyrans (The tree of liberty grows only when watered by the blood of tyrants),” Archives Parliamentaires de 1787 à 1860, vol. 57, p. 368 (1900).

And much earlier Tertullian had said: “Plures efficimur quotiens metimur a vobis; semen est sanguis Christianorum (We multiply whenever we are mown down by you; the blood of Christians is seed),” Apology, trans. T. R. Glover, pp. 226–27 (1931).

I gather that "speech limited is speech lost" may itself be a paraphrase, but I'm getting pedantic.

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