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School District Sued By ACLU Over Student's Free Speech Rights
An anonymous reader writes "The ACLU is suing Minnewaska Area Schools and Pope County, according to this article in the StarTribune. At issue: school administrators and a sheriff's deputy forced a girl to hand over login information to her Facebook and email accounts, after she posted on Facebook that she 'hated' a school hall monitor who had been 'mean' to her, and cursed in a separate Facebook comment because someone reported her. The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages and an order that would restrain school officials from attempts to regulate or discipline students based on speech made outside of school hours and off school property."
They're idiots. In a national context the term is American for people that have citizenship in the US. Despite what bigots from other parts of the super continent might think, there's rarely if ever a legitimate reason for using American in a different context.
Considering Mexicans are citizens of Los Estados Unidos de Mexico (aka United States of Mexico), and Canadians are citizens of a place called Canada (formerly the Dominion of Canada, it stands to reason that citizens of the United States of America would be referred to as Americans.
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Just because a school board/administrator writes it in to their policies doesn't make it legal or right. Those policies grossly exceed their jurisdiction when the activities occur outside school hours, on a students personal computer, and not on school property. The student is only subject to local, state and Federal law at that point not the whims of the school board.
People with some power often seek to acquire more power, and it regretably often falls on the shoulders of the people whose rights are being trampled to try to stop them.
For example the U.S. President and Attorney General have recently bestowed upon themselves the power to assasinate American citizens without any judicial oversight. Just because they say they can doesn't change the fact that they are probably violating the Constitution and their oath of office to uphold the Constitution. The burden has now shifted on entities like the ACLU to engage in a multi year battle in the courts to try to prove them wrong.
In a similar vein the Bush administration gave themselve the power to torture people which is also a violation of Federal laws and international treaties.
A problem may arise when the politicians who are breaking the laws manage to stack the judicial process, especially the Supreme court, so the courts also fail to do the right thing, and let them get away with it.
Another problem arises when you have a two party system and both parties have become equally complicit in dismantling the rule of law and trampling civil liberties.
When those two things happen all the checks and balances the founding fathers built in to the Constitution are gone, and you are on the road to a totalitarian state unless the actual people up and say NO. That is a hard thing though, most people are too afraid.
@de_machina