I'm with stupid: the perennially embattled free speech zone over our chests.

• Author: Beato, Greg

ON APRIL 29 a grassroots army of teenaged billboards, provocatively packaged in combed cotton agitprop, will be deployed across the land. Their goal? Raise consciousness, spark discussion, and, if all goes according to plan, get thrown out of class. The occasion is the sixth annual National Pro-Life T-Shirt Day.

"When school administrators harass students, tell them they can't wear the shirt, it raises awareness," says Erik Whittington, director of Rock for Life, the group that organizes the event. "The media gets a hold of it. The word gets out. The more people who hear the phrase on the shirt, the more we educate people."

This year, Whittington says his organization has big plans. To promote Pro-Life T-Shirt Day, they're creating a Rock for Life website where the young pronatalist participants can network with each other. It'll be like MySpace or Face-book, except that instead of connecting over a common interest in drunken snapshots and copyright infringement, the teens will bond via a shared passion for fetuses. Even with such Web 2.0 accessorizing, however, the key to the event's potency remains the all-powerful T-shirt. "It has abortion in big letters," says Whittington of this year's model. "Then we have three graphics side by side. The first two are images of small children in the womb at early stages. The third image is blank. Under those images, it reads, Growing. Growing. Gone."

Considering all the incendiary polemics that characterize both sides of the abortion divide, this rhetorical dinger is fairly benign. Yet some kind of escalatory alchemy occurs when free speech is wedded to casual wear; the mildly provocative becomes untenable, the sophomoric too obscene to bear. Compared to sexier media devices like, say, the iPhone, T-shirts are pretty clunky. Their storage capacity is limited. They're not Bluetooth-enabled. And yet they boast a sense of intimacy and authority few other content delivery systems can match. They come, after all, with a living, breathing byline attached. They're far more mobile than other forms of meat-space spare, such as billboards and posters; they literally get in your face.

In January of this year, several visitors wearing T-shirts emblazoned with various impeach-Bush-and-Cheney messages claimed that security guards at the National Archives Building-the place where the original version of the First Amendment now resides--barred them from the premises. In 1991, in the wake of the Gulf War, the Kuwaiti...