Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/524bv.pdf
Page Number: 660.0

524US2

Unit: $U95

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Cite as: 524 U. S. 569 (1998)

615

Souter, J., dissenting

dicate[s] that scarcity would give the State the right to exer-
cise viewpoint discrimination that is otherwise impermissi-
ble.”
Ibid.; see also Arkansas Ed. Television Comm’n v.
Forbes, 523 U. S. 666, 676 (1998) (scarcity of air time does not
justify viewpoint-based exclusion of candidates from a de-
bate on public television; neutral selection criteria must be
employed).
If the student activities fund at issue in Rosen-
berger had awarded competitive, merit-based grants to only
50%, or even 5%, of the applicants, on the basis of “journalis-
tic merit taking into consideration the message of the news-
paper,” it is obvious beyond peradventure that the Court
would not have come out differently, leaving the University
free to refuse funding after considering a publication’s Chris-
tian perspective.10

A word should be said, ﬁnally, about a proposed alterna-
tive to this failed analogy. As the Solicitor General put it

NEA, ante, at 585, is therefore misdirected.
It is not to the point that
the Government necessarily makes choices among competing applications,
or even that its judgments about artistic quality may be branded as sub-
jective to some greater or lesser degree; the question here is whether
the Government may apply patently viewpoint-based criteria in making
those choices.

10 Justice Scalia suggests that Rosenberger turned not on the distinc-
tion between government-as-speaker and government-as-facilitator-of-
private-speech, but rather on the fact that “the government had estab-
lished a limited public forum.” Ante, at 599. Leaving aside the proper
application of forum analysis to the NEA and its projects, I cannot agree
that the holding of Rosenberger turned on characterizing its metaphorical
forum as public in some degree. Like this case, Rosenberger involved
viewpoint discrimination, and we have made it clear that such discrimina-
tion is impermissible in all forums, even nonpublic ones, Cornelius v.
NAACP Legal Defense & Ed. Fund, Inc., 473 U. S. 788, 806 (1985), where,
by deﬁnition, the government has not made public property generally
available to facilitate private speech, Perry Ed. Assn. v. Perry Local Edu-
cators’ Assn., 460 U. S. 37, 46 (1983) (deﬁning a nonpublic forum as “[p]ub-
lic property which is not by tradition or designation a forum for public
communication”). Accordingly, Rosenberger’s brief allusion to forum
analysis was in no way determinative of the Court’s holding.