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524US2

Unit: $U95

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612

NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR ARTS v. FINLEY

Souter, J., dissenting

but by recognizing a new category by analogy to those
accepted ones. The analogy is, however, a very poor ﬁt,
and this patronage falls embarrassingly on the wrong side
of the line between government-as-buyer or -speaker and
government-as-regulator-of-private-speech.

The division is reﬂected quite clearly in our precedents.
Drawing on the notion of government-as-speaker, we held in
Rust v. Sullivan, 500 U. S., at 194, that the Government was
entitled to appropriate public funds for the promotion of par-
ticular choices among alternatives offered by health and so-
cial service providers (e. g., family planning with, and with-
out, resort to abortion). When the government promotes a
particular governmental program, “it is entitled to deﬁne the
limits of that program,” and to dictate the viewpoint ex-
Ibid.7
pressed by speakers who are paid to participate in it.
But we added the important qualifying language that “[t]his
is not to suggest that funding by the Government, even when
coupled with the freedom of the fund recipients to speak out-
side the scope of the Government-funded project, is invari-
ably sufﬁcient to justify Government control over the content
Indeed, outside of the contexts
of expression.”
of government-as-buyer and government-as-speaker, we
have held time and time again that Congress may not “dis-
criminate invidiously in its subsidies in such a way as to aim
at the suppression of . . . ideas.” Regan v. Taxation with
Representation of Wash., 461 U. S. 540, 548 (1983) (internal
quotation marks and brackets omitted); see also Lamb’s
Chapel, 508 U. S., at 394 (when the government subsidizes
private speech, it may not “favor some viewpoints or ideas
at the expense of others”); Hannegan v. Esquire, Inc., 327

Id., at 199.

7 In Rust, “the government did not create a program to encourage pri-
vate speech but instead used private speakers to transmit speciﬁc informa-
tion pertaining to its own program. We recognized that when the govern-
ment appropriates public funds to promote a particular policy of its own
it is entitled to say what it wishes.” Rosenberger, supra, at 833 (citing
Rust, supra, at 194).