Purple pens flew off the shelves in September of 2004 when studies released just prior to the 2004 school year showed that grading in red was “critical”, “harsh” and known to cause “self esteem issues” in children. Purple quickly replaced red as the best color choice for caring teachers.

Today the table has turned. It is now the teacher’s turn to demand they be graded with “purple pens.” On Monday a French court ordered a teacher rating website, www.note2be.com, (similar to the American site www.ratemyteachers.com) to remove all names from its site so that no teachers are personally criticized. The site will be fined 1000 Euros each day it fails to cooperate.

The site, started in late January of 2008, provided a forum for students to rank their teachers with a 6-category rubric: interesting, clear, fair, available, respectful, and motivated. Since it began, an average of 150,000 students have visited the site daily and rated 50,000 teachers.

With the average teacher ranking 14 out of a total 20 points possible (not stellar, but a passing grade) why are French teachers up in arms about this site? They give a few reasons: the site breaks privacy laws, incites public disorder, and breaches “their right to be judged only by superiors.” The country’s educational establishment denounced the site as “public lynching” and the court declared: “The exercise of freedom of information and of expression has a limit that it does not damage teaching activities.”

Entering the “rights” ring, the owners of the website have thrown a rather hefty claim back. They call it a right to “free speech.” The French court seemed to think the “right to be judged only by superiors” trumps in this case, however. Free speech is sometimes just too “red.”

Two muckracking websites are attracting controversy. WikiLeaks.org enables anonymous dissidents to post documents revealing government corruption, and a California judge just shut it down. JuicyCampus.com enables anonymous college students to post grubby gossip like “Top ten freshman sluts” and so far, the site still stands.

WikiLeaks, still available by IP address, allows whistleblowers to safely post documents exposing government and corporate misdoings. Leaks include a document outlining standard operating procedures for Guantanamo Bay and a 2,000 page document presenting “nearly the entire order of battle for US forces in Iraq.”

Bank Julius Baer was the first to fight back when someone posted documents alleging that the Swiss bank laundered money and evaded taxes. The bank demanded that the courts close the site and Judge Jeffrey White complied, ordering WikiLeaks to disable its address and stop disseminating disputed documents.

FreePress.net argues that WikiLeak must survive “because it has the potential … to be a potent force for more transparent—and therefore more accountable—government.” In a righteously indignant editorial, the New York Times decried White’s injunction as unconstitutional: “That was akin to shutting down a newspaper because of objections to one article.”

It was also akin to providing free WikiLeak advertising. Now WikiLeak documents are popping up on other websites, and the court has a First Amendment battle on its hands.

If WikiLeaks provides a “global defense of sources and press freedoms,” JuicyCampus.com provides a forum to sate people’s lust for salacious gossip. Paralleling the new TV show Gossip Girl, the site allows students to anonymously target their classmates by name. The site is unregulated, horrifying and, Dan Belzer writes in the Duke Chronicle, mesmerizing:

One look and I was unknowingly sucked into an addiction. I wanted more. More names, more dirt, more hate. I knew it was wrong, and I couldn’t morally justify adding to the hateful insanity, but I also couldn’t and can’t stop reading.

Saboteurs have hacked the website but unlike Bank Julius Baer, students with slashed reputations have little legal recourse. The First Amendment and Communications Decency Act protect the site, according to Carnegie Mellon’s The Tartan. Students who post libelous statements could be subject to prosecution, but the site’s anonymity shields them.

JuicyCampus.com and WikiLeaks.org both have a right to cruise the information highway. But when whistleblowers crash and gossipmongers thrive, shouldn’t it provoke some thought on how our culture values truth?

Probably nothing short of muzzles can silence the Rev. Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church congregation — the spotlight-hungry, God-hates-gays sophists who childishly and obscenely crashed the funeral of Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder in June, reopening a fiery debate about the dark side of free speech.

Even when a Baltimore judge last week served up a $10.9 million judgment against them, protesters said they “could not be happier.” Phelps’ daughter said she’s elated that their “message has exploded all over the world.”

Westboro congregants, whose signs read things like “Thank God for dead soldiers,” unwaveringly say the First Amendment protects their right to advertise God’s hatred of the United States, which he doles out to punish homosexuality. Somewhat ironically, the ACLU agrees and has retained an attorney for those facing legal charges. Besides violating a law that restricts protesters’ proximity to funerals, the group faces additional charges from child abuse to flag desecration (after the pastor’s daughter had her 10-year-old son trample the Stars and Stripes underfoot during the protest). But constitutional scholars, like Ronald Collins from the First Amendment Center, expect — even if they don’t like it — a reversal of the $10.9 million judgment.

Interestingly, prominent evangelicals haven’t questioned the group’s right to protest so much as they’ve asked media to expose the congregants’ specious connections to biblical Christianity — namely that Westboro is “Baptist,” suggesting affiliation with a mainstream denomination familiar to most people. Westboro’s ideology is at odds with nearly every Christian principle: God’s “hate,” for example, is etched on every sign the group brandishes — though few media outlets have exposed this as categorically unchristian.

Part of the problem is that being “Baptist” doesn’t definitively mean anything, says Terry Mattingly, who writes the “On Religion” column for Scripps Howard and whose father was a Baptist minister. (Both Bill Clinton and Al Gore are soi-disant Baptists.) Unlike Catholics and even members of the Southern Baptist Convention, plain unaffiliated Baptist churches have no official body to answer to. A solitary Washington Times story seems to have caught on to this.

WMB has often posted on Indoctrinate U, the documentary by Evan Maloney about free speech and political correctness on campuses around the country.  It’s an amateur attempt to do something like a Michael Moore documentary from a conservative angle.  The kid has promise, but he’s not quite there yet, it seems.  But maybe he is, given the fact that Stanley Fish is writing Times columns about him.

Fish gives a fair, albeit predictable, treatment of Maloney’s film, calling most of the charges red herrings.  But he does write this:

Still, when all the red herrings and non-issues have been checked off, there remain some serious questions. Why, Maloney asks, should “schools pay people to operate offices and programs that are blatantly political in nature?” (He has in mind offices and programs like Women’s Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, African American Studies, Chicano Studies.)

Read Fish’s answering of this charge here.  Learn more about the documentary here.