hnpcc | (no subject)

Slate article on the Supreme Court (US) case about strip-searching a student alleged to have ibuprofen. Could also be titled "can we get some more women on the bench, please?"

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?"

This leads Ginsburg to sputter—in what I have come to think of as her Lilly Ledbetter voice—"what was done in the case … 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.

Also interesting point:

You see, we now have school districts all around the country finding naked photos of teens and immediately calling in the police 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. And the parents? They are always the last to know.

Ah, it's the combination of drugs (aspirin) and self-made porn that's so worrying there.

In other news my friend's school has been closed after a second case of swine flu cropped up there. The radio was pointing out that so far all cases are in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, with none being south of the Yarra. I'm amazed they haven't put up barricades on all bridges to prevent the NOY-yobbos fleeing south. God knows there's a subset that would certainly consider it - although that would also limit their access to Brunetti's, ACMI and a few other things, so maybe not. In the meantime it's certainly an incentive to stay away from MacDonalds.

Edit: No, they've shut Canterbury Girls School too, so it has made it SOY. I was starting to wonder why it was localised so far north, but apparently it's not. Good. I think. Still, the majority of cases are in the north, at least at this stage. Also - does anyone else think that Catch the Fire Ministries and/or Fred Nile is currently working on a way to link this to either MidSumma, IVF legislation, abortion or possibly gun control? Just me?