Facts
- The South Boston Allied War Veterans Council, led by John J. Hurley, was authorized by Boston to organize the annual St. Patrick’s Day–Evacuation Day Parade and obtained a city permit each year.
- The parade drew large crowds and included many marchers and participating groups.
- The Irish-American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston (GLIB) sought to march in the 1993 parade under its own banner to express pride in being Irish and openly gay, lesbian, or bisexual.
- The Council refused to allow GLIB to participate under that banner.
- GLIB sued in Massachusetts state court under a public accommodations statute barring discrimination based on sexual orientation in places of public accommodation, resort, or amusement.
- The trial court ordered the Council to include GLIB, reasoning the parade lacked a single theme and that the Council’s broad inclusion of groups showed no meaningful expressive selectivity.
- The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court affirmed, treating the parade as a place of public accommodation and holding the statute’s enforcement constitutional.
- The U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari.
Issues
- Whether applying a state public accommodations law to require private parade organizers to include a group conveying a message the organizers do not wish to convey violates the First Amendment.
- Whether a parade with no sharply defined or uniform theme nonetheless constitutes protected expressive activity such that organizers retain control over participant selection.
Decision
- The Supreme Court unanimously reversed.
- Parades are protected expression, and First Amendment protection extends beyond words on banners to the overall expressive act of organizing and presenting a parade.
- Selecting which contingents may march is part of the organizers’ expressive activity and is protected even when the event’s message is broad or imprecise.
- Forcing the organizers to include GLIB would alter the parade’s expressive content and constitute compelled speech.
- As applied, the public accommodations law operated impermissibly by compelling the organizers to incorporate an unwanted message into their own expression.
Legal Principles
- A parade is a form of expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment, even if its message is not unitary or precisely articulated.
- Private speakers have a constitutional right to choose the content of their expression, including the selection of participants in a collective expressive event.
- The state may not compel a private speaker to include or host expression that changes the speaker’s intended message; compelled inclusion that alters expressive content violates the First Amendment.
- Generally applicable antidiscrimination laws may not be enforced in a manner that effectively treats a private speaker’s expression as a public accommodation and forces modification of that expression.
Conclusion
The Court held that Massachusetts could not apply its public accommodations statute to compel private organizers of the St. Patrick’s Day–Evacuation Day Parade to include GLIB, because mandatory inclusion would change the parade’s expressive content and violate the First Amendment’s ban on compelled speech.