I saw an offensive T-shirt in an Orange Beach store the other day. I was surprised because the Orange Beach city council had passed an ordinance earlier this month mandating that offensive T-shirts be placed out of view and shown only on request to people over 18 years of age.

The first amendment to the U.S. Constitution says Congress shall make no law “abridging the freedom of speech,” but what does that mean exactly? Like much of the Constitution, this provision can seem unclear when you try to apply it to specific cases.

Is the display of merchandise a form of free speech? Should merchants be allowed to display offensive wares? Should they be allowed to sell offensive products? Should people be allowed to wear offensive clothing on the street? Offensive to whom? Shouldn’t people be free to sell and wear what they want? So what if I don’t like it? This is a free country!

Well, yes and no. The first amendment was presumably enacted to protect free political discourse, and that’s a good thing. But the courts have said the right to free speech isn’t absolute. It doesn’t allow you to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater, and you can’t defame a person’s character in print. Yet you can broadcast a political ad that wildly distorts what a candidate has said, and you can say the F-word wherever you want, including on TV. Where do you draw the line on free speech, and who is to draw it?

I’d favor a loose interpretation of the first amendment, giving officials wide latitude to ban clothing and other items deemed offensive to the community.

Some years ago I saw a young man on the steps of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. wearing a T-shirt I’ll never forget. I shall not report here what the shirt said (and I’m sure the editor would strike it out if I did), but it had to do with sucking something, and I found it hugely offensive. The young man was not arrested or told to change his shirt for a less provocative one. I think he should have been.

The same goes for song lyrics. Some rock music these days is incomprehensible to me — it sounds like incoherent screaming — but young people can apparently understand it, and when they tell me what the lyrics say, I cringe. Misogyny! Hatred! Violence! Rape! I’d yank those songs off the airwaves and wash those singers’ mouths out with soap. What are we teaching our children by letting them listen to that trash?

But back to the T-shirt I saw in Orange Beach the other day. I think the city council’s ordinance pertained to shirts advocating drug use and carrying sexually explicit messages.

The T-shirt I saw wasn’t about sex or drugs. It showed a young man carrying an M16 assault rifle with the words “I don’t call 911.” Jeez! Is that meant to suggest that you can start spraying bullets around when there’s a disturbance of some kind or when someone walking down the street looks suspicious to you? Why was the Orange Beach city council concerned about sexually suggestive T-shirts but not about that T-shirt? I’d ban it.

But let me close with an uplifting T-shirt story. I once led a Christian renewal weekend for teenagers. At the start of the weekend, each of us drew the name of one other participant and agreed to pray silently for that person throughout the weekend. One young man wore a T-shirt that offended me. It sported an in-your-face political message with which I strongly disagreed. I took an immediate dislike to the young man.

At the end of the weekend, we were asked to seek out the person we’d been praying for and identify ourselves. When I saw this young man approaching me, I tried to sink out of sight. But he found me and said, “Rev. Schmidt, I wanted you to know that I’ve been praying for you every hour for the past three days. You have been a blessing to me on this weekend and I want to thank you.”

I was deservedly humbled and have tried ever since not to judge people wearing odd T-shirts. But still.

Richard H. Schmidt is a retired Episcopal priest, editor and author who lives in Fairhope. He can be reached at courier@gulfcoastnewspapers.com.