The recent issues around President Obama’s speech to students across the United States came shortly after I received the Amicus brief filed by the Student Press Law Center on the appeal of the U.S. District Court of Connecticut ruling in the Doninger v. Niehoff case and it seems as if the two may be somehow related.

Just imagine, if you will, some student writing in a blog at home one evening earlier this week something to the effect, “Thanks to the douchebags at the Central Office, we will not get to listen to President Obama address students across our country.” To keep this politically neutral, it could just as well say, “we will have to listen to President Obama address students”. Let’s imagine that the writer went on to talk about her mother being upset and contacting the administration which got them really pissed off, and suggesting that other students encourage their parents to similarly contact the school administration.

Would it be a good thing if a few weeks from now, the administration found such a blog post and punished the student for writing it on her own time at home? I submit that not only would it not be a good thing, but it would strike at the fundamental freedoms of our country for it seems to abridge the freedom of speech and the right of the people to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Yet this is exactly what the Doninger case is all about. True, Ms. Doninger was writing about a different event, a music festival being organized by the students, but the principle is the same.

The SPLC starts off by noting that “in an era when mainstream journalism has expanded into blogs and other new media, the ruling below poses a serious threat to the First Amendment rights of student journalists throughout this Circuit and the nation.”

They go on to say, “The court below framed a controlling question of law: “Whether a school may discipline a student for inappropriate comments made off campus on a blog… The SPLC urges reversal of the lower court’s decision, which held that the First Amendment did not protect Ms. Doninger from being punished for posting a blog entry from her home that used a colloquial term for ‘jerk’ to criticize a decision made by her school’s administrators.”

Key points that the SPLC brought up included that “The speech at issue occurred entirely outside of school property, from a computer in the student’s home. It was conveyed through a medium (a blog) that could only be ready by individuals who deliberately sought access by entering specific search terms into a computer. And the student’s words themselves were quintessential political speech, criticizing the decision of school officials in contemporary, colloquial terms and inviting others to petition for redress if they, too, disagreed with the decision.”

“The District Court’s ruling would move this Circuit toward a standard under which anything posted online is regarded as having been distributed on campus, based on its potential (even if unrealized) to be read or acted upon on campus. This is a drastic and dangerous move that the Court should resist. Because it is established that schools may prohibit the on-campus distribution of materials their officials have not reviewed, the District Court’s standard would permit a principal to enforce a rule against writing anything online about the school unless an administrator has pre-approved it.”

We may not like the words used by students to express their opinions, we might not even agree with the opinions, but there are important lessons to be learned. How much does the Government, in the form of school administrations and District Courts honor the importance of freedom of speech and the right of the people to petition the Government for a redress of grievances? To me, these are fundamental to the sound functioning of our government, even when the level of civility is less that I would like and we risk grave damage to our democracy by punishing people for speaking openly and candidly about their opinions about school administrations and the Government.