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NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR ARTS v. FINLEY

Opinion of the Court

that would be impermissible were direct regulation of speech
or a criminal penalty at stake. So long as legislation does
not infringe on other constitutionally protected rights, Con-
gress has wide latitude to set spending priorities. See
Regan, supra, at 549.
In the 1990 amendments that incor-
porated § 954(d)(1), Congress modiﬁed the declaration of pur-
pose in the NEA’s enabling Act to provide that arts funding
should “contribute to public support and conﬁdence in the
use of taxpayer funds,” and that “[p]ublic funds . . . must
ultimately serve public purposes the Congress deﬁnes.”
§ 951(5). And as we held in Rust, Congress may “selectively
fund a program to encourage certain activities it believes to
be in the public interest, without at the same time funding
an alternative program which seeks to deal with the problem
in another way.”
In doing so, “the Gov-
ernment has not discriminated on the basis of viewpoint; it
has merely chosen to fund one activity to the exclusion of
the other.”
Ibid.; see also Maher v. Roe, 432 U. S. 464, 475
(1977) (“There is a basic difference between direct state
interference with a protected activity and state encourage-
ment of an alternative activity consonant with legislative
policy”).

500 U. S., at 193.

III

The lower courts also erred in invalidating § 954(d)(1)
as unconstitutionally vague. Under the First and Fifth
Amendments, speakers are protected from arbitrary and dis-
criminatory enforcement of vague standards. See NAACP
v. Button, 371 U. S. 415, 432–433 (1963). The terms of the
provision are undeniably opaque, and if they appeared in a
criminal statute or regulatory scheme, they could raise sub-
stantial vagueness concerns.
It is unlikely, however, that
speakers will be compelled to steer too far clear of any “for-
bidden area” in the context of grants of this nature. Cf.
Board of Airport Comm’rs of Los Angeles v. Jews for Jesus,
Inc., 482 U. S. 569, 574 (1987) (facially invalidating a ﬂat ban