Lead Stories
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In October the Federal Communications Commission ruled that the word “fucking,” as employed by U2 singer Bono during the live Golden Globe telecast in January, was not indecent language: Bono did not use it to describe a sex act but rather to intensify the word “brilliant.” And two weeks later, a state court of appeals in Austin, Texas, ruled that giving someone the finger in traffic does not constitute disorderly conduct, since the gesture is no longer provocative enough to incite an “immediate breach of the peace.”
In October in Conroe, Texas, 15-year-old Brandon Kivi was arrested and suspended from Caney Creek High School (and threatened with expulsion and felony charges) for lending his girlfriend his asthma inhaler. The couple have the same prescription, and the girl had left her inhaler at home; nonetheless, administrators decided that Kivi’s potentially lifesaving generosity was “delivery of a dangerous drug.” (He’s now homeschooling.) And in September in Duncanville, Texas, 13-year-old honor student Raylee Montgomery was suspended because her shirt had come partway untucked, a violation of the dress code (her school, which has roughly 3,500 students, handed down more than 700 dress-code-related suspensions in the first five weeks of the academic year).
Unclear on the Concept
