Ethics

MO Court Protects Gay Pride Protestors

By Ed Brayton

A federal court in Missouri has turned a preliminary injunction into a permanent one (PDF), ruling that the city of St. Louis cannot prevent Christian groups from handing out literature and expressing their beliefs at a gay pride event. Both sides actually agreed to the injunction and submitted the language of the injunction together and that is a good thing, as is the injunction itself.

While the group cannot disrupt the gay pride event or try to drown it out, they have an absolutely protected constitutional right to hand out literature and express their views about homosexuality. The injunction allows reasonable, content-neutral restrictions like a ban on putting fliers on cars or a general park curfew, but they cannot prevent speech or literature distribution merely because it expresses a given point of view.

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on June 20, 2009 (boomark / email).