Contradiction? What’s that?

Two free speech decisions rendered yesterday highlight the strict adherence to ideology, rather than logic or law, which guides the Roberts Supreme Court. In case number one, the Court ruled 5-4 that a student’s “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banner hung at a school-sponsored event was not protected speech because the message advocated illegal drug use. Strangely, the Court specifically limited the scope to advocacy of drug use and not other crimes.

In a concurrence, Justices Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy said the court's opinion "goes no further" than speech interpreted as dealing with illegal drug use.

"It provides no support" for any restriction that goes to political or social issues, they said.

That seems oddly narrow to me but what do I know.

(Sidebar – what do you think the Court would do if the banner had read “Darvocet tabs for Jesus”?)

The second case of interest was also a First Amendment issue but the outcome would seem to contradict the first ruling. The Court ruled that McCain-Feingold unconstitutionally outlawed certain types of advertising prior to elections.

Under the 2002 campaign finance reform pushed by Republican McCain and Democratic Senator Russ Feingold, interest groups were banned from funding ads that name a candidate for office in the immediate run-up to an election.

The aim was to prevent the kind of "attack ads" that have become increasingly prevalent on the US political scene in the closing weeks of heated campaigns.

Specifically, ads paid for out of corporate coffers were barred 30 days before a primary ballot, and 60 days before a general election.

Chief Justice John Roberts said the court had to draw a line between partisan ads explicitly targeting a candidate in the home stretch of a campaign, and broader campaign messages by advocacy groups.

"In drawing that line, the (constitutional) First Amendment requires us to err on the side of protecting political speech rather than suppressing it," Roberts wrote in the majority opinion.

I call bullshit. For one thing, conservatives, especially the corporatist wing, always favor is amplifying the influence of money and that is what this is about. The Right has the money and they like it to speak for them.

But what really irks me is viewing these decisions side by side. Follow me here: speech that advocates something illegal, by inference, is speech that argues for a change in the law. How can one interpret that as anything but political speech? To my mind, one cannot. Yet the Court held that speech of this type is not protected. Speech that is, however, directly political and practiced by shady groups with little or no accountability in mass media is protected. So why is one form of political speech good and another bad? How can one resolve this obvious contradiction? Everything makes sense when view through the lens of ideology. Conservatives believe that drugs are bad (they are correct here) and the Chamber of Commerce is good (here, not so much). Therefore, money must have its megaphone and unpopular ideas must be quashed. With these two cases, the Court boldly and broadly said screw equal application and consistency, we answer to the higher calling of ideological purity.