What the sex is political speech anyway?

A woman was arrested for contempt of court in Lake County. Jennifer LaPenta walked into a courtroom wearing a shirt saying:

I own the (female body part) so I make the rules.

Well, sure. I can think of an entire lexicon of slang for various female body parts, but in the interest of art and good taste, I will assume her shirt said Georgia O'Keefe. As in, "I have the Georgia O'Keefe at this party, so I'm gonna paint this iris purple." In and of itself, I don't even see how this could possibly be offensive to anyone, much less Lake County Associate Judge Helen Rozenburg. I mean, one might predict a level of empathy for the shared struggle of women to achieve equality, as women still only earn about 78 percent of what men do for equal work, among numerous other examples of injustice. Back to that in a moment.

From a legal standpoint, this t-shirt's flowery prose is a tricky issue. I am sure we are all reminded of the landmark First Amendment case from 1971, Cohen v California. Paul Robert Cohen was arrested for disturbing the peace after wearing a jacket at the Los Angeles Courthouse that said "(Slang for sexual penetration) the Draft." It's a noteworthy difference in this case that he did not wear the "Posh and Becks the Draft" jacket inside a courtroom, but that he did wear it in a hallway. Anyway, as Justice Harlan writes in the decision:

We cannot lose sight of the fact that, in what otherwise might seem a trifling and annoying instance of individual distasteful abuse of a privilege, these fundamental societal values are truly implicated. That is why "[w]holly neutral futilities . . . come under the protection of free speech as fully as do Keats' poems or Donne's sermons," Winters v. New York, 333 U.S. 507, 528 (1948) (Frankfurter, J., dissenting), and why "so long as the means are peaceful, the communication need not meet standards of acceptability," Organization for a Better Austin v. Keefe, 402 U.S. 415, 419 (1971).

This really is a brilliant bit of legal writing, right down to the famous lines:

For, while the particular four-letter word being litigated here is perhaps more distasteful than most others of its genre, it is nevertheless often true that one man's vulgarity is another's lyric.

Well-said, unless you're some kind of ninny about the "evils" of moral relativism. However, it would seem that since the young woman in our case wore the shirt in the courtroom that she violated the authority of the court--rather than "disturbing the peace," which was the charge in Cohen. That is, Judge Rozenburg must have seen the t-shirt as a challenge to her authority--even though the woman wearing it was not a defendant or there for any official reason whatsoever. No, it would seem that in spite of whatever lofty notions we may have had about women's rights and solidarity, that the judge in this case has asserted that she, in fact, has the bigger Georgia O'Keefe. Take that, glass ceiling.