The First Amendment lives in La Marque, Texas, but common sense and good taste are on life support.

Kathryn Fridge, 29, was arrested after uttering The Mother of All Expletives while shopping for batteries at Wal-Mart (WMT) to prepare for a hurricane forecast to slam the region.

The Galveston County Daily News reports that the woman told her 2-year-old daughter, “They don’t have any f- - - - - - more.”

Such language isn’t exactly what you’d expect a young mother to teach her daughter, but it’s hardly a hanging offense.

Assistant Fire Marshal Alfred A. Decker IV (the Roman numeral suggests he’s a BFD) overhead the comment, took the woman to his car, handcuffed her and wrote a citation.

Brilliant! That was last August. Last week, the city prosecutor got around to dropping the charge.

After all, the nasty word was overheard - it wasn’t directed at anyone, including the crusading assistant fire marshal who has apparently taken it upon himself to regulate speech in the aisles of major discount stores. And, come to think of it, bad taste and improper language are still matters of free expression - even in Texas.

The young mother figures the honcho firefighter “flipped out about something.” Good guess. Next time, perhaps he should slap on the handcuffs “for the children” - a move that’s sure to be greeted with roars of approval from everyone except grumpy libertarians.

Here’s betting there’s a false arrest lawsuit on the horizon. That’s bound to enrich the plaintiff’s attorney and suck more tax dollars out of the town’s till. But as long as the assistant fire marshal is in the business of banning speech, perhaps he could do something about these horrors: paradigm, synergy, proactive, basically, holistic, like, sucks and (your least favorite buzzword here.)

“After completion of (the) investigation to the facts of the case and existing case law, the state contends there is insufficient evidence to proceed and moves to dismiss,” the city prosecutor said in a prepared statement.

In small Texas towns, they actually pay people to figure out the obvious, and it only took from August until March.

Oh, f- - - it.