Patrick Gonzalez, a student at Woodlake Hills Middle School in San Antonio, Texas, really likes the San Antonio Spurs. Indeed, he likes them so much that he shaved Spurs’ player Matt Bonner’s image into the back of his head. Seriously:

Unfortunately for Gonzalez, his school principal apparently does not share his love for Mr. Bonner, as Gonzalez’s school told him to get rid of the haircut or he will receive an in-school suspension.

This is hardly the greatest injustice in human history, but the school district’s actions are probably unconstitutional. Although public school students do not have the same First Amendment rights they enjoy beyond the schoolhouse doors, the Supreme Court established more than four decades ago that schools may only censor expression that “might reasonably have led school authorities to forecast substantial disruption of or material interference with school activities.” No doubt Gonzalez’s haircut prompted some of his classmates to comment on it when they should have been paying attention to a lesson, but it’s tough to imagine the haircut would have caused “substantial” disruption of the classroom. Kids get excited by new things, then they get bored with them, and a schoolteacher should be capable of dealing with this fact in a way that does not strip their students of their ability to express themselves.

Admittedly, some lower courts have suggested that the First Amendment’s reach is more limited in the context of school uniforms, so if the school has a general policy against certain kids of haircuts than it is possible that a court could uphold the schools’ action here. They shouldn’t, however. As the Fifth Circuit explained, school uniform policies are valid, at least in part, because they “pertain only to student attire during school hours and do not affect other means of communication.” News reports suggest that Gonzalez was required to get rid of his haircut, rather than simply being required to cover it up when he is in class. If this is right, than the school effectively stripped him of his First Amendment rights even when he is no longer attending school — since he can hardly switch his hair back once the school day ends.

According to a poll by the Marijuana Policy Project, nearly three quarters of respondents believe that the federal government should defer to a state’s decision to legalize marijuana for certain uses, even when federal law calls for stricter enforcement:

QUESTION: Currently, 16 states plus the District of Columbia have made the medical use of marijuana legal. In some of these states, individuals have been authorized to cultivate and sell medical marijuana under tightly regulated conditions. However, medical marijuana use remains illegal under federal law, even in states that have passed laws or ballot measures that allow it for medical treatment.

Do you feel President Obama should: (ORDER ROTATED)

- Respect the medical marijuana laws in these states, or

- Use federal resources to arrest and prosecute individuals who are acting in compliance with state medical marijuana laws? . . .

RESPECT STATE LAWS 74% . . .
PROSECUTE FED LAW 15% . . .
NOT SURE 11% . . .

To be fair, much of the language in this poll question is highly suggestive — the phrase “tightly regulated conditions,” for example, implies that marijuana use will still be closely guarded even in states with relatively permissive laws — so it is likely that the poll would not have achieved such a dramatic contrast if it had used less loaded language. Nevertheless, the poll is consistent with other polls showing increased support for liberalization of marijuana policy, including a recent Gallup poll showing majority support for outright legalization.

The poll also highlights the very real political danger facing progressive lawmakers if they continue to support a marijuana policy that is both overreaching and unpopular. Regardless of how they poll, there is simply no question that federal marijuana laws are constitutional. The Constitution gives Congress the power to “regulate commerce . . . among the several states,” and this includes the power to ban a substance from commerce entirely. Moreover, states simply do not have the power to nullify federal laws that they do not wish their citizens to be required to follow.

Nevertheless, many tenther activists who believe that everything from Social Security to Medicare to national child labor laws violate the Constitution are aggressively trying to entice young people into their movement by highlighting the fact that their misreading of the Constitution would also lead to federal marijuana laws being declared unconstitutional — or, at least, significantly rolled back. Progressive lawmakers can ill-afford to cede a generation of young voters to an extremist movement simply because they would rather cling to policies the country neither wants nor benefits from.

While the House was busy limiting the protections of immigrant women who are subject to sexual violence in their version of the Violence Against Women Act, Human Rights Watch released a report documenting the sexual abuse and harassment that they are commonly faced with. Because their immigrant status makes female immigrant farmworkers fearful of reporting offenders, they are particularly vulnerable to abuse. The report, which included 162 interviews in 11 states, mirrors two previous ones that focused on California The Washington Post reports.

“Our research confirms what farmworker advocates across the country believe: sexual violence and sexual harassment experienced by farmworkers is common enough that some farmworker women see these abuses as an unavoidable condition of agricultural work,” said the report.

An estimated 630,000 of the 3 million people who perform migrant and seasonal farm work are female. The federal government estimates that 60 percent of them are undocumented.

“It’s easiest for abusers to get away with sexual harassment where there’s an imbalance of power, and the imbalance of power is particularly stark on farms,” the report’s author, Grace Meng, told The Associated Press.

Fear of being deported prevents female farmworkers from reporting the instances of rape, stalking, fondling, and vulgar language that are described in the report. Farmworkers described experiences such as the following:

• A woman in California reported that a supervisor at a lettuce company raped her and later told her that she “should remember it’s because of him that [she has] this job.”
• A woman in New York said that a supervisor, when she picked potatoes and onions, would touch women’s breasts and buttocks. If they tried to resist, he would threaten to call immigration or fire them.
• Four women who had worked together packing cauliflower in California said a supervisor would regularly expose himself and make comments like, “[That woman] needs to be fucked!” When they tried to defend one young woman whom he singled out for particular abuse, he fired all of them..

In the report, Human Rights Watch calls for strengthened legal protections for immigrant farmworkers, starting with enacting the Senate version of VAWA. The House failed to respond to this recommendation, and in fact reduced protections available to immigrant crime victims in VAWA. Right now, victims of sexual abuse who cooperate with law enforcement may be eligible for U visas, which make women feel safe to report crimes to police without fear of deportation. The House version of VAWA limits U visas to cases actively under investigation or currently being prosecuted. These limits create gray areas around investigation and prosecution that could expose victims to deportation.

–Alex Brown

Yesterday, the Alabama legislature passed a bill preserving most of the most overreaching provisions of HB 56, the state’s harsh immigration law, and adding a new requirement that a state agency “post a quarterly list of the names of any undocumented alien who appears in court for a violation of state law, regardless of whether they were convicted.” To his credit, Gov. Robert Bentley (R-AL) expressed serious reservations about the bill, explaining that the legislature should remove the new provision and another existing provision discouraging children from attending school:

“There were some things added (to the bill) that I think is a public relations problem that I would like to deal with,” Bentley said at a news conference.

Specifically, a portion of the bill that asks Homeland Security to publish the names of those arrested under the law.

“It does not make it a better bill,” he said.

He also wants changes to how public schools collect information from students.

“I just don’t want children to be asked about the parents’ legal status,” Bentley said.

It’s good news that Bentley wants to remove at least one of the worst parts of HB 56 — the provision that led 7 percent of the Hispanic students in Alabama public schools to skip school the day after the law went into effect — be repealed. Nevertheless, he’s coming to this party very late. Bentley signed the original HB 56 nearly one year ago.

Earlier this week, the Virginia House of Delegates rejected Tracy Thorne-Begland, a former Navy pilot and top Virginia prosecutor, for a seat on Virginia’s lowest ranking trial court because, in the words of Del. Bob Marshall (R-VA), Thorne-Begland’s gay “lifestyle is exactly contrary to” his obligation to uphold the state constitution. On CNN this morning, Marshall doubled-down on this view, explaining that he blocked Thorne-Begland because the judicial candidate had the audacity to serve his country while gay:

MARSHALL: [Thorne-Begland] had to misstate his background in order to be received into the military in the late 1980s. There was a specific question, “are you a homosexual?” He had to say no. He took an oath of office which he had to defy. . . . Dr. Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks never took an oath of office that they broke. Sodomy is not a civil right. It’s not the same as the Civil Rights Movement. You have to look at the past, and, in fact, look, in late 2011 he was critical of the, you know, Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell. He criticized our attorney general simply for explaining what the law of Virginia is with respect to certain protected classes.

Watch it:

First of all, “sodomy,” as Marshall so quaintly puts it, is a civil right. That was the holding of Lawrence v. Texas, which established that consenting adults have a right to be free from government interference in their “private sexual conduct.”

Additionally, while it may in fact be true that Thorne-Begland once misrepresented his sexuality in order to serve his country in the United States Navy, it is important to understand exactly what he signed up for when he told this potential lie. Tracy Thorne-Begland was a Navy pilot, and his superiors did nothing to hide from him the dangers inherent in this job. When Thorne-Begland was stationed at Virginia Beach, he was informed that 25 percent of pilots are killed in action over the course of a 20 year career. This was the job he might have lied in order to sign up for — to risk his life every day in defense of his county. Bob Marshall, by contrast, never served a day in the United States military.

Nor, apparently, did Marshall familiarize himself with civil rights history during all that time he spent not serving his country. Martin Luther King may not have taken an oath of office, but his entire career was rooted in a campaign to peacefully defy unconstitutional laws. And while there is some dispute over whether Rosa Parks’ famous decision to keep her seat on a Montgomery bus violated a city ordinance or merely a racist custom, her refusal to stand is widely perceived as an act of civil disobedience that triggered a movement of opposition to Jim Crow laws. A judge’s oath is to the Constitution, and Thorne-Begland acted with the greatest respect for our founding document when he fought back against the unconstitutional and now-repealed Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell policy.