Freedom of Speech Comes Home to Roost

18 years later, the Supreme Court vindicates The-Rooster.com.

The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 yesterday in favor of a former high schooler’s freedom of speech lawsuit (eat shit, Clarence Thomas) and naturally my first instinct as life’s beloved antagonist was to think about my personal story arc which I one day be a future Blockbuster movie after I sell the rights for tens of dollars to the first cocaine-addled Hollywood cretin swindles me.

For those that missed it, the Supreme Court vindicated a young woman’s right to “post through it” back when she was a freshman cheerleader in high school:

From Jess Bravin of The Wall Street Journal:

In this instance, “the school’s interest in teaching good manners is not sufficient, in this case, to overcome [the student’s] interest in free expression,” Justice Breyer wrote, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

The case stems from a May 2017 Snapchat post that Brandi Levy, then a high-school sophomore in Mahanoy City, Pa., sent to some 250 followers after failing to make the varsity cheerleading squad.

“F— school f— softball f— cheer f— everything,” the 14-year-old, frustrated at the prospect of another year on the junior-varsity team, wrote on her cellphone, posting a photo of herself and a friend extending middle fingers. The Snap automatically disappeared in 24 hours, but a screenshot of the message made its way to a cheerleading coach. Despite Ms. Levy’s apologies, the school then suspended her from the junior-varsity team for the school year, saying she had violated various rules including prohibitions of foul language, unsportsmanlike conduct and disrespect of the school.

For most people, it might be hard to understand why public school teachers and school administrators spent hours upon hours chastising a teen girl for expressing a fleeting thought on a social media platform that lied to her its object permanence. Not me.

I often thank God that I didn’t grow up in the era of social media. It’s true, I am a socially stunted, terminally online nerd. But Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Snapchat didn’t arrive until I was in college. I would currently be wearing a black bag over my head for 23 days in Guantanamo Bay if I had been able to tweet during high school.

The Rooster started as the-rooster.com in December 2001 as a birthday gift from my parents when I was a sophomore at Marion Harding. It was a blog before a blog was called a blog, by which I mean “the insane and poorly edited ramblings of a petulant child who thinks he knows better than everyone.”

You’re probably asking how that differentiates The Original Rooster from today’s edition. Fair question. The big difference was I was my mom served on the school board while her teenager son went home every night to type edgy stuff like “school sucks lol” and “only me and my friends are cool.”

If I were a teacher who stumbled upon my screeds by typing my URL into their web browser, I would have laughed at the acne-riddled child that hadn’t even paid an energy bill in his life.

There were days I spent more time in the principal’s office listening to the grievances of random teachers that culminated with my fink biology teacher sending me to the assistant principal’s office for “insubordination” because I doodled in stead of starting my homework in the last five minutes of class when he apparently had nothing left to teach us about one of life’s most bedrock sciences.

The kangaroo court sentenced me to three days in-school suspension, which meant spending my school day in a concrete basement overlorded by a fascist assistant football coach who moonlighted as a social studies teacher. Fuck that, I quit.

When my mom picked me up she said I could transfer to Marion Pleasant if I wanted, so I knew I had served my last day in the comfy confines of Harding.

I’ve held grudges for the last 18 years, despite transferring to River Valley and meeting friends I’ll cherish forever. That’s how I’m wired because I was forged in a village of freaks like Harding’s principal who went to the school one night and chiseled the commemorative “the-rooster.com” brick she purchased to be displayed outside the new Harding campus that she helped spearhead before choosing to resign over her dipshit son’s vapid posts online. The only reason it got returned was because my mom threatened a lawsuit.

I used to wish me (read: my family) would have sued the District for harassing me for the high crime of typing crude opinions onto the internet from my private computer outside of school hours. It’s not like I was threatening to turn the place into a shooting gallery.

Though it would have been fun to retire to TittyIsland after liquidating those clowns in a historic Supreme Court Decision reaffirming a teen’s rights to free speech, the ultimate victim would have been the future students for having a big chunk of change coming out their school budget. That’s what I tell myself whenever I check my account and it’s not stuffed with blood money.

Hopefully moving forward we as a society can agree that teens have a right to post and sometimes they’ll do something crass. The Supreme Court agrees we have bigger issues to solve than tone policing teens.

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