Opinion ID: 718699
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: The Nature of the City's Restriction

Text: 13 Having classified the type of forum involved, we now turn to the type of restriction that the City has imposed. The Senior Center Policies and Procedures Manual from the City's Office of Senior Affairs includes the following directive: It is prohibited to use any OSA facility for sectarian instruction or as a place for religious worship. The City contends that this policy is a restriction based upon content, not viewpoint, because it disallows all sectarian instruction and religious worship in its Senior Centers, regardless of the particular religion involved. The Supreme Court, however, has rejected similar arguments. In Lamb's Chapel, for example, the Court noted that the mere fact that a regulation categorically treats all religions alike does not answer the critical question of whether viewpoint discrimination exists between religious and nonreligious expression. 508 U.S. at 392-94, 113 S.Ct. at 2147. Here, the City had already opened the doors of its Senior Centers to presentations about religion, such as The Bible as Literature and Myths and Stories About the Millennium. The City allowed speakers at Senior Centers to discuss the Bible from a strictly historical perspective and to address religion as long as such presentations could be characterized as a literature discussion or a philosophical discussion. The film Jesus dealt with subject matter similar to that which would be included in a class on the Bible as literature. The film ran afoul of City policy, however, by advocating the adoption of the Christian faith. In contrast, a film about Jesus's life that ended on a skeptical note and urged agnosticism or atheism would not have contravened the City's policy. Because [t]he prohibited perspective, not the general subject matter triggered the decision to bar the private expression, Rosenberger, --- U.S. at ----, 115 S.Ct. at 2517, the City's policy is properly analyzed as a viewpoint-based restriction on speech. 14 Moreover, even if the City had not previously opened the Senior Centers to presentations on religious subjects, its policy would still amount to viewpoint discrimination. Any prohibition of sectarian instruction where other instruction is permitted is inherently non-neutral with respect to viewpoint. Instruction becomes sectarian when it manifests a preference for a set of religious beliefs. Because there is no nonreligious sectarian instruction (and indeed the concept is a contradiction in terms), a restriction prohibiting sectarian instruction intrinsically favors secularism at the expense of religion. Therefore, we conclude that the City's policy constitutes viewpoint discrimination. 15