If you have kids in the Poway Unified School District, you might want to simply assume there will be less money for instruction and classroom supplies in the years to come. Litigation is expensive, you see, and when you have a school board on a collision course with the U.S. Constitution, more litigation would seem pretty unavoidable.

Not that Poway is any stranger to being sued for stomping all over the rights of students who don't think the way the board majority thinks they should. The district has spent who knows how many tens of thousands of dollars (maybe more) defending itself in an ongoing lawsuit that arose when officials punished a student for wearing a T-shirt that read "Homosexuality is shameful."

Tyler Chase Harper wore that T-shirt in response to a pro-gay rights event at Poway High School, and was told to remove the shirt. He refused, and was ultimately suspended. The conservative Alliance Defense Fund and liberal American Civil Liberties Union are both asking the courts to overturn the suspension (although Harper is now long since graduated) as a violation of Harper's free speech rights and, presumably, to keep the district from behaving similarly in the future.

And yet, despite the ongoing lawsuit, which the district stands a good chance of losing, it is now (over)reacting to a spate of swastikas and nooses recently found on the district's campuses - crafting new policies to crack down on "hate behavior."

Which sounds reasonable, I suppose, if we can all agree on just what constitutes "hate" - and don't mind getting rid of the First Amendment's free speech clause while we're at it.

The plain fact of the matter is that in many cases (certainly Harper's) one person's "hate speech" is another person's deeply held truth. (And defacing school property is already a crime under state vandalism laws.)

The last thing any of us should tolerate is a government that wants to tell us what we can or can't say or believe.

The entire concept of "hate" laws is built on a juvenile concept of freedom - the idea that we can be "free" of being offended, or "free" of having our feelings hurt.

Few of us like seeing racially charged symbols like Nazi swastikas, but if displayed peaceably and not through defacing others' property, it is perfectly legal to wave a swastika - no matter how odious most of us may find them.

What the founders of this country knew (through having lived most of their lives under a patriarchal form of government that felt no compunction about telling its subjects what they could or couldn't say) is that real freedom is loud, messy, argumentative and in fact guarantees we'll all be offended at some point in time.

And that's better than the alternative.

Once the government is allowed to ban one viewpoint, it can ban any - or all - of them.

The Poway Unified School District is already being sued for trying to tell a student he couldn't express his disagreement with the district-sanctioned gay rights events. Now they're talking about silencing any other students who stray from the accepted line and say things other students or staff may find offensive.

Seems a good time to be a lawyer for the Poway district, anyway - work should be plentiful.

- Contact columnist Jim Trageser at (760) 631-6628 or jtrageser@nctimes.com.