We haven’t given out a First Amendment Bad Ass award in a while, but Connecticut State Senator, Gary D LeBeau, come on down! LeBeau has proposed a “student speech” bill in the Connecticut General Assembly.
Sen. Gary D. LeBeau, the Democrat from East Hartford who co-chairs the General Assembly’s Commerce Committee, said today that he was spurred to introduce his bill by the nationally publicized case of Avery Doninger, a former Burlington high school student disciplined for a 2007 Internet posting she wrote from her home.
“I strongly believe in the First Amendment,” the lawmaker said. “And after what school administrators did in the Doninger case, what’s needed is a bright line of where the state — since the school was acting on behalf of the state — can impinge on the rights of individuals. I think they overstepped in this case.
“As long as a message like hers is not sent directly to a school, or if she is not using school equipment, this young person and everyone else has a right to say what they think,” he added. “Unfortunately, the way she said it was pretty offensive, but that happens — and that’s sometimes the very speech that needs to be protected.” (source)
Hell yeah.
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February 1, 2009 at 12:18 am |
Good post, Marc. Problem is, I don’t think this guy has any idea what the Internet is, how blogs work, or what speech was really at issue in the Doninger case.
I wrote a post about it here: A Doninger legislative fix?
February 1, 2009 at 12:59 am |
You make a very compelling point. I guess that if passed, it might become little more than symbolic in nature, huh? Even so… I’ll take it.
February 2, 2009 at 3:56 pm |
Perhaps, but does it do more harm than good? Because if a court interprets “correspondence” narrowly to mean a person-to-person communication, then the court could specifically rule that blog posts are _not_ intended to be protected speech (with the “inclusion of one thing excludes another” statutory maxim). If the whole point is to protect Avery Doninger’s “douchebag” post on livejounal, the statute may have just the opposite effect. And, without any clearly defined remedies, the statute could result in needless litigation.
To be honest, I’d prefer no statute at all to one that mucks things up worse.