Should murder, rape and pedophilia be outlawed? Should First Amendment rights be chucked? The answer to any question that begins with ‘should’ is found in the fabric of a culture; a society dictates its own answers. So, should First Amendment rights for students be protected? The event that took place last week at Orange County High School for the Arts made it apparent that student rights is a frayed and unfinished part of the American pattern.

Administrators last week kept Orange County High School for the Arts’ student newspaper from going to print because principal Sue Vaughn wanted to hear the rationale behind including in a news piece that a new company managing the cafeteria is Christian-based.

The administration went a step further by stating it would review each future issue before the newspaper went to print.

Unless Vaughn and her administration meant to break state law, she was ignorant of the meaning of California Education Code Section 48907 that states, “Pupils of the public schools shall have the right to exercise freedom of speech and of the press … There shall be no prior restraint of material prepared for official school publications except insofar as it violates this section.”

Sources stated that the administration admitted its error and will reinstate the paper’s protected rights.

But behind the blatant censorship of the student newspaper is the fact that authority too often wants to suspend student rights.

“The whole issue of student freedom is one that has been kicked around for a few years. There’s a lot of intimidation and a lot of control in high school student newspapers by principals, perhaps even by teachers, trying to create more of a public relations organ rather than a real true newspaper,” Rick Pullen, Dean of the College of Communications, said.

In fact, beyond authoritative principals and teachers, members of the current Supreme Court of the United States have moved against student rights as recently as 2007.

In the 2007 Morse v. Frederick case, Justice Clarence Thomas basically stated in his opinion that students do not have free speech rights until they turn 18.

Apparently, our own high justices do not realize that rulings are reflections on our society. And if Thomas knew this, he believes that American culture does not support the virtue of honesty.

Any ruling against a form of expression, whether it be a smile or a murder, is a display on the values of the culture of the ruling body: outlaw a smile, and your society is shown to dislike smiles; outlaw murder, your society does not support murdering. So outlaw the right of a student to express a fact: your society does not support openness and honesty.

“This is what primarily frightens me about journalism today: our worriedness about offending someone else gets in the way of reporting. Sometimes speech offends because life offends. What right do we have to try to protect our readers from the ugliness of life?” Genelle Belmas, professor of media law, said.

Belmas acknowledges that students actively engage in life, and it follows that they engage with all the vileness that adults face.

“I can’t sanitize your life for you. And that’s what I am afraid we end up doing with our kids. We want to protect them. … But in so doing, we go overboard and we take away rights that they will as adults get to enjoy in the name of their own safety,” Belmas said.

Those in grade school are the vessels for our future values. They will run the looms that weave the pattern of our culture.

To keep rights from them is to deny rights to our successors.

America must be better than that.