Free Speech Law Suit Debate in Washington Over Cruel Video

In Seattle, Washington, a high school student was suspended for making a cruel video about his English teacher, "Mongzilla." Taking secret video footage during class, his montage captured students making obscene gestures at the teacher, filmed her bent over, and alleged that she didn't bathe. In essence, it was juvenile and hurtful humor.

When his teacher found out about it, she complained to the school. Action was taken quickly - the student was suspended for forty days. He and his parents fought it in court, using a free speech argument, but a federal judge upheld the school's right to suspend the student - not because the young man had no right to free speech in the school, but because his behavior and that of the other students involved disrupted class.

There are at least five very good reasons the school was right in suspending Gregory Requa, beyond the judge's ruling.

Why Suspending Requa Was Right

1. Requa's free speech argument is specious at best. Freedom of speech is guaranteed by the government, but your freedom to speak freely with no repercussions is limited severely. If you give away company secrets, your employer has every right to fire you. If you slander another person, that person has the constitutional right to sue you.

In this case, the teacher was arguably injured. It's a variation of the "if you prick me, do I not bleed?" argument. Just because she is a teacher and an authority figure does not mean she is not also human. It was correct that the young man in question discover the consequences of his actions - in fact, it could be argued that it became a valuable part of his education.

2. Similarly, the rights we are granted in the constitution are not infinite. They are limited to the point where your right to do something infringes on the rights of others, especially innocent others.

When you exercise your freedoms to do harm to or endanger others - as in when someone chooses to drive drunk - you are infringing upon their rights. Our Constitution is designed to have the maximum amount of freedom for everyone while ensuring that those freedoms are protected from ourselves as well - for, as the Declaration of Independence says, our posterity.

We often do not give the Founding Fathers enough credit for their wisdom and foresight. It is no accident that America has the oldest unchanged government in the world.

3. Schools don't follow laws; rules for kids go beyond laws for the purpose of teaching kids discipline. The purpose of a school is to educate children, not to be a Petri dish for testing American constitutional liberties. Children - that is, anyone under the age of 18 - by necessity have rights limited by the law. They cannot drive, they cannot hold property except in trust, and they cannot live without adult supervision unless granted the right in special court hearings.

It is ludicrous to expect children to be granted the same rights as adults. Part of growing up is learning how to maturely exercise those rights. And part of what our schools need to do is turn out good citizens. Allowing the infringement upon someone else's rights to go unpunished would not satisfy that requirement.

4. Even 40-year-old women can be hurt by bullying behavior. Beyond the constitutional and legal arguments, there's a definite social argument that this young man deserved the punishment he received. While schools are trying to eliminate bullying of students in school, they can hardly sanction the bullying of teachers. What kind of example would that set?

While a mature woman probably does not suffer to the same degree from bullying as an adolescent, she undoubtedly was hurt by the nasty comments and images. And it is pretty certain that those comments and images were intended to cause her emotional pain, which is a pretty unpleasant comment on this young man's character.

5. School is not for filming hurtful video, but for learning. The young man and his friends were involved in conducting a private activity during school time that almost certainly disrupted their class. Taxpayers spend billions of dollars on the classes our children take. This sort of behavior - on taxpayer money - is simply not to be tolerated. There were other kids in that class who were there to learn. They should have been afforded that opportunity.

Children cannot be expected to modify their behavior without an adult example. Parents, teachers, school administrators, politicians, and judges all need to provide this example to our children. There is no way, otherwise, that they will learn all they need to know in order to be good citizens in their towns, nation, and world. Had this young man been allowed to get away with his hateful and nasty behavior on the grounds of free speech, we would all have been cheated.

One Reason The Suspension Was Wrong

What didn't come out in national media, which seemed adolescently fascinated with airing the nasty video over and over, was that Requa was far from the only teen involved - and may, in fact, have been one of the lesser perpetrators. The young man who made the video (unidentified except for his initials, S.W.) was not punished because he identified others involved.

Only Requa, out of several kids involved, was punished - and his unilateral punishment seems to have been out of proportion to the extent of his actual crime, allegedly posting, not shooting, the video. The last time this was acceptable in an American court of law - several perpetrators pointing the finger at a single other person, and that single other person receiving overwhelming punishment in its entirety - was in Salem, Massachusettes, in 1692, a little thing called the Witch Trials.