By Wendy Kaminer,

“(M)ost Americans have a non-dogmatic approach to faith,” the Pew Forum happily announced this week. Pew’s widely reported, 2008 “Religious Landscape Survey” found that Americans combine religiosity (92% profess belief in God or a “universal spirit”) with tolerance: “Most Americans agree with the statement that many religions – not just their own – can lead to eternal life.

This is partially a free speech blog, so we’d be remiss in failing to note the passing of George Carlin. He failed to convince the Supreme Court of the absurdity of the Federal Communications Commission’s “broadcast indecency” rules that scrubbed the airwaves during the day and evening (when, presumably, the kiddies are awake) of those naughty words that we all hear and (if the truth be told) many of us use quite regularly.

This morning’s Boston Globe reports on the criminal prosecution and college disciplinary proceeding simultaneously pending against two Wentworth Institute of Technology male students who had the bad sense (and bad grace) to videotape two female Massachusetts College of Art and Design students having an intimate moment in bed in a dormitory within all-too-easy sight range.

By Harvey Silverglate

The Massachusetts judiciary – and as a result, the people of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts – are about to lose one of liberty’s most effective and reliable friends. But just because state Superior Court Judge Isaac Borenstein will retire from his life-tenured position on the state’s trial court on September 12^th doesn’t mean that he will disappear altogether from the battle for freedom, decency, and fairness.

In a puritan streak, Harvard University has forced several student groups who were planning on hosting a "Barely Legal" party to change the name -- or they otherwise couldn't hold the party, according to the Harvard Crimson and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). (Disclosure: Free For All writer Harvey Silverglate is Chairman of the Board of Directors of FIRE.

In a puritan streak, Harvard University has forced several student groups who were planning on hosting a "Barely Legal" party to change the name -- or they otherwise couldn't hold the party, according to the Harvard Crimson and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). (Disclosure: Free For All writer Harvey Silverglate is Chairman of the Board of Directors of FIRE.

Last September, Harvey wrote in The Free For All about Star Simpson -- the MIT student who was arrested at Logan Airport for wearing a (prank) sweatshirt displaying a working circuit board connected to a battery -- and predicted that "there is no way prosecutors can convince twelve sane jurors that a student, wearing such a sweatshirt with the flashing lights tacked onto the outside rather than hidden underneath her clothing, was actually trying to perpetrate a hoax that she was a suicide bomber."