{"id":7491,"date":"2009-04-23T10:33:21","date_gmt":"2009-04-23T17:53:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=7491"},"modified":"2009-04-23T10:33:21","modified_gmt":"2009-04-23T17:53:09","slug":"supreme-court-seems-poised-to-okay-schools-strip-searching-13-year-old-for-ibuprofen-also-stephen-breyer-needs-to-stop-rewatching-that-scene-in-porkys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=7491","title":{"rendered":"Supreme Court Seems Poised to Okay Schools Strip-Searching 13-year-old for Ibuprofen; also, Stephen Breyer needs to stop rewatching that scene in "Porky's""},"content":{"rendered":"

Dahlia Lithwick reports<\/a> on the oral arguments at the Supreme Court, involving a 13 year old girl stripped-searched because she had been falsely accused of giving ibuprofen to other students:<\/p>\n

Adam Wolf, the ACLU lawyer who represents Redding, explains that “the Fourth Amendment does not countenance the rummaging on or around a 13-year-old girl’s naked body.” Wolf explains that he is arguing for a “two-step framework,” wherein schools can use a lower standard to search “backpacks, pencil cases, bookbags” but a higher standard when you “require a 13-year-old girl to take off her pants, her shirt, move around her bra so she reveals her breasts, and the same thing with her underpants to reveal her pelvic area.” This leads Justice Stephen Breyer to query whether this is all that different from asking Redding to “change into a swimming suit or your gym clothes,” because, “why is this a major thing to say strip down to your underclothes, which children do when they change for gym?”<\/p>\n

This leads Ginsburg to sputter\u2014in what I have come to think of as her Lilly Ledbetter voice\u2014”what was done in the case \u2026 it wasn’t just that they were stripped to their underwear! They were asked to shake their bra out, to stretch the top of their pants and shake that out!” Nobody but Ginsburg seems to comprehend that the only locker rooms in which teenage girls strut around, bored but fabulous in their underwear, are to be found in porno movies. For the rest of us, the middle-school locker room was a place for hastily removing our bras without taking off our T-shirts.<\/p>\n

But Breyer just isn’t letting go. “In my experience when I was 8 or 10 or 12 years old, you know, we did take our clothes off once a day, we changed for gym, OK? And in my experience, too, people did sometimes stick things in my underwear.”<\/p>\n

Shocked silence, followed by explosive laughter. In fact, I have never seen Justice Clarence Thomas laugh harder. Breyer tries to recover: “Or not my underwear. Whatever. Whatever. I was the one who did it? I don’t know. I mean, I don’t think it’s beyond human experience.” […]<\/p>\n

You see, we now have school districts all around the country finding naked photos of teens and immediately calling in the police<\/a> for possession of kiddie porn. Yet schools see nothing wrong with stripping these same kids naked to search for drugs. Evidently teenage nakedness is only a problem when the children choose to be naked.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Scott at Lawyers Guns and Money<\/a> breaks down how the vote is likely to go (Scalia is likely to vote for student’s privacy rights, incidentally, while this will probably be the second time<\/a> Alito has favored the state strip-searching little girls).<\/p>\n

Three points:<\/p>\n

1) Yet anther example of how the drug war has eroded sanity.<\/p>\n

2) Yet another example of why a Court with only one woman on it is a court that’s unable to fairly administrate justice. ((Yes, women aren’t always more connected to reality on these issues than men; I’m sure Camille Paglia, for example, would see nothing wrong with Breyer’s logic. But this isn’t a question of absolute difference; it’s a question of odds. A Court with 4 or 5 women on it would be substantially less likely to have Ginsburg be the only Justice appalled by Breyer’s rationalization.))<\/p>\n

3) Yet another example of why Democratic presidents appointing “centrist: judges while Republicans appoint far-right judges creates right-wing outcomes, not balance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dahlia Lithwick reports on the oral arguments at the Supreme Court, involving a 13 year old girl stripped-searched because she had been falsely accused of giving ibuprofen to other students: Adam Wolf, the ACLU lawyer who represents Redding, explains that … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,96,111],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-the-news","category-rape-intimate-violence-related-issues","category-supreme-court-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7491"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7491\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}