Are Easton "Boobies" Bracelets Really Obscene?

 Have you been keeping abreast of the chest-beating going on over the wearing of ''I Love Boobies" bracelets?

The flap has wound up in U.S. District Court where the Easton Area School District is defending its decision to suspend two Easton Area Middle School students who, with their parents' backing, refused to remove the bracelets when ordered to do so by school officials.

Enter the American Civil Liberties Union, claiming that the students' First Amendment rights have been compromised by the administration's actions. For their part, the students claim that they wore the bracelets to call attention to breast cancer awareness and to encourage others to learn more about the pervasive disease that has affected the girls' loved ones.

At the heart of the issue is whether the bracelets violate the district's dress code which bans clothing and other items showing ''nudity, vulgarity, obscenity, profanity and double entendre pictures or slogans."

Middle School Principal Angela DiVietro testified last week that if this ban were lifted she could envision even more pointed messages testing her administration's efforts to maintain a distraction-free school environment. She specifically wondered about ''I love balls" or maybe even ''I love titties."

Many consider ''boobies" to be an innocuous and harmless reference to female breasts -- pretty much in the same category as ''tush" and ''rear" are less-offensive words for the human posterior or ''Johnson" was as a code word a decade ago for ''penis."

It raises some interesting questions about words and phrases that show up on some people's obscenity or vulgarity lists. After Central Catholic's heart-stopping state championship win Friday night over Bishop McDevitt, freshman Viking Zack Krause was quoted as calling the accomplishment ''freakin' awesome." We all know what ''freakin'" really means.

Suppose an student is caught listening to Cee Lo Green's ''F.U." (the ''Forget You" clean version) on her iPod; is she subject to a suspension because of the double entendre?

Or suppose a student wears a ''Little Fockers" t-shirt to class showing photos of the just-released film's two stars Ben Stiller and Robert De Niro; does the student risk expulsion if he carelessly pronounces that ''F" word incorrectly?

What happens if a student returns from summer vacation sporting a ''Big Pecker's t-shirt from the famous Ocean City, Md., bar and grill?  

Should we paraphrase President Ron Angle's angry rant against the court system hearing the dispute over his father's  will  as ''screw them all," rather than what he actually said? Hint: It wasn't ''screw."

Determining what is ''vulgar, obscene or profane" frequently is in the eye of the beholder. As Justice Potter Stewart wrote in the famous 1964 Supreme Court case Jacobellis v. Ohio regarding obscenity, ''I know it when I see it."  Wearing an 'I Love Boobies" bracelet isn't it.

As for a double entendre, Webster's College Dictionary says it's ''a word or expression used so that it could be understood in two ways, especially when one is risque."

With ''boobies," there is no second meaning; it is what it is – slang for ''breasts." Oral arguments in the federal court case are scheduled to be heard on Feb. 18 in Philadelphia.

Bruce Frassinelli of Schnecksville is an adjunct instructor at Lehigh Carbon Community College.