9th Circuit Follies

Eugene Volokh has the temporarily alarming story of more 9th Circuit Lunacy.

Why ‘temporarily’? This will probably be overturned (read the dissenting opinion linked in the article – the Supreme Court can just cut and paste their own names and court info over it and stick it to Judge Stephen Reinhardt’s forehead.

What makes me think this ruling will fall by the wayside?. If one follows this link to a great Matt Rees article, you’ll find Judge Reinhardt was ‘probably one of the most overturned judges in history’ when the article was written…in 1997. He has to be THE most overturned black robe in history by now.

The Judge is the personification of the 9th Circuit. Which reminds me of a joke I heard in a law class:

Your Honors, we move that the findings of the 9th Circuit be overturned....and on other grounds as well.

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Just checked before posting. Instapundit has already gotten the word out. Dang. Never get in a public argument with someone who buys ink by the barrel and never think you can scoop a blogger that has a laptop grafted into his lap.

Update 1
I was told my punch line was "off".....since corrected

Update 2

Hmmm.

First Volokh wrote:

Tyler Harper wore an anti-homosexuality T-shirt to school, apparently responding to a pro-gay-rights event put on at the school by the Gay-Straight Alliance at the school. On the front, the T-shirt said, "Be Ashamed, Our School Embraced What God Has Condemned," and on the back, it said "Homosexuality is Shameful." The principal insisted that Harper take off the T-shirt. Harper sued, claiming this violated his First Amendment rights…….

And then Carpenter wrote that the outcome was ‘The Right Result Under a Bad Precedent’:

The problem is that it's expressed in a context that is already a living hell for gay kids in many public schools, as it probably was in this one, making it difficult for them to concentrate on getting an education.
When you're a closeted gay kid sitting in math class behind that guy wearing that T-shirt staring you in the face the whole time, and you know you have nobody to talk to about how it demeans your most intimate feelings, your whole world starts to look pretty desolate. At the very least, it's hard to focus on hypotenuses. Judge Kozinski put the point well in his dissent, when he said he was sympathetic to the argument that "students in school are a captive audience and should not be forced to endure speech that they find offensive and demeaning." Such messages, he wrote, "may well interfere with the educational experience even if the two students never come to blows or even have words about it.

Let’s do a hypothetical shoe-on-the-other-foot thing, by merging Volokh’s description of the apparent cause of the young man wearing his "Homosexuality is Shameful” t-shirt with Carpenter’s “Right Result-Bad Precedent” post:

The problem is that [the pro Gay Rights Event is] expressed in a context that is already a living hell for [many religious] kids in many public schools, as it probably was in this one, making it difficult for them to concentrate on getting an education.
When you're a [devout and traditional Christian] kid sitting in math class [the day of the big Gay Rights Event with advocates getting] in [your] face the whole time, and you know you have nobody to talk to about how it demeans your most intimate feelings, your whole world starts to look pretty desolate. At the very least, it's hard to focus on hypotenuses. Judge Kozinski put the point well in his dissent, when he said he was sympathetic to the argument that "students in school are a captive audience and should not be forced to endure speech that they find offensive and demeaning." Such messages, he wrote, "may well interfere with the educational experience even if the two students never come to blows or even have words about it.

Seems to me the school facilitated the imposition of a hostile environment upon the student who was just trying to get his POV across.

Update 3.
I posted in the comments of Carpenter’s post:

Actually, the Kozinski point seems pretty lame to me, because it was not the authorities who were imposing views upon a captive audience in the case that was before the court. If the case had been about suing over the school sanctioning of a ‘Big Gay Event’ with the resultant imposition upon the children/others who feel homosexuality is wrong, then there might have been some logic to it. As it is, it looks like we are just one step closer to only certain segments of the population having “divine right to never be offended”, at least until the ruling gets overturned (which I believe will happen).