Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/529bv.pdf
Page Number: 398.0

529US1

Unit: $U42

[10-11-01 11:58:08] PAGES PGT: OPIN

Cite as: 529 U. S. 277 (2000)

323

Stevens, J., dissenting

speech, are presumptively invalid. Under today’s opinion,
a State may totally ban speech based on its secondary ef-
fects—which are deﬁned as those effects that “happen to
be associated” with speech, Boos v. Barry, 485 U. S. 312, 320–
321 (1988); see ante, at 291—yet the regulation is not pre-
sumptively invalid. Because the category of effects that
“happen to be associated” with speech includes the narrower
subset of effects caused by speech, today’s holding has the
effect of swallowing whole a most fundamental principle of
First Amendment jurisprudence.

II

The plurality’s mishandling of our secondary effects cases
is not limited to its approval of a total ban.
It compounds
that error by dramatically reducing the degree to which the
State’s interest must be furthered by the restriction imposed
on speech, and by ignoring the critical difference between
secondary effects caused by speech and the incidental effects
on speech that may be caused by a regulation of conduct.
In what can most delicately be characterized as an enor-
mous understatement, the plurality concedes that “requiring
dancers to wear pasties and G-strings may not greatly re-
duce these secondary effects.” Ante, at 301. To believe that
the mandatory addition of pasties and a G-string will have
any kind of noticeable impact on secondary effects requires
nothing short of a titanic surrender to the implausible.
It
would be more accurate to acknowledge, as Justice Scalia
does, that there is no reason to believe that such a require-
ment “will at all reduce the tendency of establishments such
as Kandyland to attract crime and prostitution, and hence to
foster sexually transmitted disease.” Ante, at 310 (opinion
concurring in judgment); see also ante, at 313, n. 2 (Souter,
J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). Nevertheless,
the plurality concludes that the “less stringent” test an-
nounced in United States v. O’Brien, 391 U. S. 367 (1968),
“requires only that the regulation further the interest in