Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/529bv.pdf
Page Number: 369

529US1

Unit: $U42

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ERIE v. PAP’S A. M.

Opinion of O’Connor, J.

So, while the demonstrators were allowed to erect “symbolic
tent cities,” they were not allowed to sleep overnight in
those tents. Even though the regulation may have directly
limited the expressive element involved in actually sleeping
in the park, the regulation was nonetheless content neutral.
Similarly, even if Erie’s public nudity ban has some mini-
mal effect on the erotic message by muting that portion of
the expression that occurs when the last stitch is dropped,
the dancers at Kandyland and other such establishments are
free to perform wearing pasties and G-strings. Any effect
on the overall expression is de minimis. And as Justice
Stevens eloquently stated for the plurality in Young v.
American Mini Theatres, Inc., 427 U. S. 50, 70 (1976), “even
though we recognize that the First Amendment will not tol-
erate the total suppression of erotic materials that have
some arguably artistic value, it is manifest that society’s in-
terest in protecting this type of expression is of a wholly
different, and lesser, magnitude than the interest in untram-
meled political debate,” and “few of us would march our sons
and daughters off to war to preserve the citizen’s right to
see” speciﬁed anatomical areas exhibited at establishments
like Kandyland.
If States are to be able to regulate second-
ary effects, then de minimis intrusions on expression such
as those at issue here cannot be sufﬁcient to render the ordi-
nance content based. See Clark v. Community for Creative
Non-Violence, supra, at 299; Ward v. Rock Against Racism,
491 U. S. 781, 791 (1989) (even if regulation has an incidental
effect on some speakers or messages but not others, the reg-
ulation is content neutral if it can be justiﬁed without refer-
ence to the content of the expression).

This case is, in fact, similar to O’Brien, Community for
Creative Non-Violence, and Ward. The justiﬁcation for the
government regulation in each case prevents harmful “sec-
ondary” effects that are unrelated to the suppression of ex-
pression. See, e. g., Ward v. Rock Against Racism, supra,
at 791–792 (noting that “[t]he principal justiﬁcation for the