It was branded as a case of sleeping with the enemy: Conservative Christians and civil libertarians – groups at war almost incessantly over the teaching of evolution in school, public prayer, the Pledge of Allegiance, crosses on public lands and a multitude of other issues – both support “Bong Hits 4 Jesus"

The case, heard yesterday by the U.S. Supreme Court, involves an Alaskan high schooler who cut class to stand on the street as an Olympic torch runner passed and held aloft the “Bong Hits” sign. After the student was suspended for exercising free speech, his defense did not rest solely on the “secular humanists” who so often defend the Constitution, but also came from the conservative Christians who most certainly don't believe Jesus would be encouraged by ganja-induced stupors in his name.

“'Bong Hits 4 Jesus' Case Finds Strange Legal Bedfellows” was the headline from Religion News Service, posted on Beliefnet.com. And that is the temptation – to think civil libertarians and biblical literalists never cozy up together.

In fact, the groups are not so monogamous.

Two years ago, Christians and the ACLU – and dozens of other religious groups and civil-liberty organizations – lobbied the Supreme Court in favor of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, a 7-year-old federal law aimed at protecting religious minorities in land-use disputes and religious freedom for prisoners. Last year, Christians and friends joined the ACLU in supporting a small religious group that used peyote in its services.

“There is a pretty well standing tradition of various religious denominations banding together and filing amicus briefs to the Supreme Court regardless of the practice at issue,” said Gene K. Schaerr, who represented 17 religious organizations, including the National Association of Evangelicals, the Baptist Joint Committee, the First Church of Christ Scientist, the Union for Reform Judaism, the Sikh Coalition and the Muslim Minaret of Freedom Institute, in a friend of the court brief supporting the religious sect, O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao Do Vegetal.

"It was an amazingly broad coalition of everything from very conservative evangelicals and Roman Catholics to the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State."