Court Opinion

ID: 9627736
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 08:52:44.605628+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:39:17.023271
License: Public Domain

BROWN, J., Dissenting.
In America, Father Terminiello can give a speech in which he describes the crowd outside the auditorium as “ ‘imported from Russia’ ” (Terminiello v. Chicago (1949) 337 U.S. 1, 19 [69 S.Ct. 894, 902, 93 L.Ed. 1131] (dis. opn. of Jackson, J.)) and then adds, “I speak of the Communistic Zionistic Jew .... We don’t want them here; we want them to go back where they came from.” (Id. at p. 21 [69 S.Ct. at p. 903].) In America, Clarence Brandenburg can attend a Ku Klux Klan rally, stand near a large burning cross wearing a hood, and give a speech saying, “ ‘Personally, I believe the nigger should be returned to Africa, the Jew returned to Israel.’ ” (Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) 395 U.S. 444, 447 [89 S.Ct. 1827, 1829, 23 L.Ed.2d 430].) In America, Nazis can march through the streets of the predominately Jewish community of Skokie, Illinois, wearing uniforms and displaying swastikas. (National Socialist Party v. Skokie (1977) 432 U.S. 43 [97 S.Ct. 2205, 53 L.Ed.2d 96]; see also Collin v. Smith (7th Cir. 1978) 578 F.2d 1197, cert. den. 439 U.S. 916 [99 S.Ct. 291, 58 L.Ed.2d 264].) In each instance, racist and discriminatory views are being expressed. Nevertheless, these expressions are protected by the First Amendment to the federal Constitution and by our state Constitution. We as a nation so value the free exchange of ideas that we are willing to tolerate even offensive ideas, knowing that “one man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric” (Cohen v. California (1971) 403 U.S. 15, 25 [91 S.Ct. 1780, 1788, 29 L.Ed.2d 284]) and today’s heretical idea may become tomorrow’s gospel.
“[T]ime has upset many fighting faiths.” (Abrams v. United States (1919) 250 U.S. 616, 630 [40 S.Ct. 17, 22, 63 L.Ed. 1173] (dis. opn. of Holmes, J.).) For example, the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, and even a solar-centric solar system were once controversial ideas, but today are considered conventional wisdom. Some ideas—like bigotry and prejudice— *190have been wrong from the beginning and always will be. And when we are confronted with bigotry, our visceral reaction is to strike back hard, which in this case took the form of the tough injunction the court upholds today. But hostility, hatred, jealousy, resentment, envy, and vengefulness áre passions as old as humankind and, though the expression of such sentiments may cause much misery and mischief, hateful thoughts cannot be quelled at too great a cost to freedom. “That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution.” (Ibid.)
“If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable” (Texas v. Johnson (1989) 491 U.S. 397, 414 [109 S.Ct. 2533, 2545, 105 L.Ed.2d 342])—that is, until today. Today, this court holds that an idea that happens to offend someone in the workplace is “not constitutionally protected.” (Plur. opn., ante, at p. 137.) Why? Because it creates a “hostile . ... work environment” (id. at p. 126) in violation of the Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA). (Gov. Code, § 12900 et seq.) In essence, the court has recognized the FEHA exception to the First Amendment.
In Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson (1986) 477 U.S. 57 [106 S.Ct. 2399, 91 L.Ed.2d 49] (Meritor), the United States Supreme Court held that a “hostile environment” could constitute workplace sex discrimination in violation of title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII). (Meritor, supra, 477 U.S. at pp. 66, 73 [106 S.Ct. at pp. 2405-2408].) Specifically, the high court held that a plaintiff need not suffer “ ‘tangible loss’ of ‘an economic character,’ ” as distinguished from “ ‘purely psychological aspects of the workplace environment,’ ” in order to recover under Title VII. (Meritor, supra, 477 U.S. at p. 64 [106 S.Ct. at p. 2404].) In support of its holding, the court cited with approval the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s guidelines on discrimination because of sex, which defined unlawful “sexual harassment” as including “ ‘verbal . . . conduct of a sexual nature.’ . . . [having] ‘the purpose or effect of . . . creating an intimidating, hostile, or offensive working environment.’ ” (Id. at p. 65 [106 S.Ct. at pp. 2404-2405].)
In Harris v. Forklift Systems, Inc. (1993) 510 U.S. 17 [114 S.Ct. 367, 126 L.Ed.2d 295] (Harris), the court reaffirmed and refined its holding in Meritor. The court held that a discriminatory environment need not cause “concrete psychological harm” to violate Title VII; rather, it need only “reasonably be perceived ... as hostile or abusive.” (Id. at p. 22 [114 S.Ct. at p. 371].) More important, in Harris, unlike Meritor, the only conduct that was at issue was offensive speech. Thus, in Harris (and in dictum in *191Meritor), the high court recognized what is in essence the statutory tort of injurious speech. How does that holding reconcile with the court’s statement just a few years earlier in Hustler Magazine v. Falwell (1988) 485 U.S. 46 [108 S.Ct. 876, 99 L.Ed.2d 41], reaffirming its “longstanding refusal to allow damages to be awarded because . . . speech . . . may have an adverse emotional impact on the audience”? (Id. at p. 55 [108 S.Ct. at p. 882].) The residents of Skokie, Illinois—some of whom had survived the horrors of the Holocaust in Europe only to face similar hatred on the streets of America— must have learned about Meritor and Harris and wondered why hostile and offensive speech is remediable in the often rough-and-tumble environment of the workplace, but not on the streets and sidewalks of our neighborhoods. (See Rowan v. Post Office Dept. (1970) 397 U.S. 728, 738 [90 S.Ct. 1484, 1491, 25 L.Ed.2d 736] [upholding a statute protecting people from objectionable speech in the places where they live].) A constitutional scholar would answer that the high court has never addressed whether Title VII’s ban on “offensive” “ ‘verbal . . . conduct’ ” in the workplace is consistent with the First Amendment. (Meritor, supra, 477 U.S. at p. 65 [106 S.Ct. at p. 2404].) Nevertheless, the plurality opinion assumes the high court resolved that issue long ago and in favor of censorship.
The plurality notes that the FEHA has the same broad scope as Title VII, and, like Title VII, it prohibits “[v]erbal harassment” (plur. opn., ante, at p. 129) that is “ ‘sufficiently pervasive so as to . . . create an abusive working environment ....’” (Id. at p. 130, quoting Fisher v. San Pedro Peninsula Hospital (1989) 214 Cal.App.3d 590, 608 [262 Cal.Rptr. 842].) Then, with an offhand summary of the holdings in Meritor and Harris and no further analysis, the plurality states that “these decisions are at least implicitly inconsistent with any suggestion that speech of this nature is constitutionally protected.” (Id. at p. 135.) Why? These cases did not even discuss the First Amendment, let alone apply it. Finally, the plurality relies on dictum that is not even on point from R.A.V. v. St. Paul (1992) 505 U.S. 377 [112 S.Ct. 2538, 120 L.Ed.2d 305] (R.A.V.).
The issue in R.A.V. had nothing to do with Title VII or workplace discrimination. Rather, R.A.V. held that, even when speech falls within a category that is generally subject to regulation—such as obscenity, defamation, or fighting words—the government cannot regulate the speech in a content-based way. (R.A.V., supra, 505 U.S. at pp. 383-384 [112 S.Ct. at p. 2543].) “Thus, the government may proscribe libel; but it may not . . . proscribe] only libel critical of the government.” (Id. at p. 384 [112 S.Ct. at p. 2543].) Similarly, the government may proscribe fighting words, but it may not proscribe only those fighting words that “provoke violence ‘on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender.’ ” (Id. at p. 391 [112 S.Ct. at *192p. 2547].) In dictum elaborating on this point, the court noted that this content-neutrality requirement is less strict in the case of fighting words and similar “prescribable speech” than in the case of “fully protected speech.” (Id. at p. 387 [112 S.Ct. at p. 2545].) As an example, the court noted, expressly without deciding, that “sexually derogatory ‘fighting words,’ among other words, may” violate Title VII, though this regulation of only those fighting words that are “sexually derogatory” is obviously not content-neutral. (Id. at p. 389 [112 S.Ct. at p. 2546], italics added.)
This tentative dictum is hardly a “rulingO” (plur. opn., ante, at p. 137) that “leave[s] little room for doubt” (id. at p. 136), and, in any case, it is clearly limited to “prescribable speech” such as fighting words. Indeed, if it were not so limited, it would fail to illustrate the high court’s point, which is that the content-neutrality requirement applies less strictly in the case of “prescribable speech.” As such, this dictum can hardly be characterized as a definitive determination that the First Amendment does not protect speech that creates a hostile work environment. On the contrary, R.A.V. emphasizes that the content-neutral requirement is more strict in the ease of “fully protected speech.” (R.A.V., supra, 505 U.S. at p. 387 [112 S.Ct. at p. 2545].) Thus, if anything, R.A.V. suggests Title VII’s content-based regulation of speech is invalid to the extent it regulates “fully protected speech” like the speech at issue here. In other words, if the ordinance at issue in R.A.V. was unconstitutional because it singled out for regulation only those fighting words that “provoke[d] violence ‘on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender’ ” (R.A.V., supra, 505 U.S. at p. 391 [112 S.Ct. at p. 2547]), then a fortiori Title VII is unconstitutional because it is a content-based regulation of speech not limited to fighting words.
I can think of no circumstance in which this court has brushed aside such an important constitutional protection as the right to free speech on the basis of so little analysis or authority. And it is no answer that the government is merely proscribing discriminatory conduct, whether or not spoken words are an integral part of that conduct, and therefore it can incidentally regulate speech in the workplace without violating the First Amendment. (Plur. opn., ante, at pp. 134-135, 137, fn. 6.) Here, it is the speaker’s philosophical beliefs and opinions themselves that cause the injury, and it is those beliefs and opinions that the government wants to censor. If government can censor those beliefs and opinions under the rubric of merely proscribing discriminatory conduct, then it can also punish Father Terminiello for discriminatorily denouncing Russian Jews in his speech in a Chicago auditorium, and it can punish Clarence Brandenburg for advocating the deportation of Blacks, and it can prevent Nazis from marching through the streets of Skokie.
Indeed, if applied generally, the plurality’s rule would create the exception that swallowed the First Amendment. As part of the FEHA, the Legislature *193has also attempted to address the problem of discrimination in our neighborhoods by regulating residential real estate transactions. (Gov. Code, § 12955.) If, in furtherance of this goal, the Legislature had enacted a prohibition against “verbal conduct” creating a “hostile sidewalk environment” analogous to the similar prohibition that applies in the workplace, courts could then enjoin speeches and parades that express discriminatory ideas, and under the plurality’s open-ended standard, these injunctions would be constitutional because they merely proscribed discriminatory conduct with only an incidental effect on speech. The plurality simply has not explained what makes the workplace different from all the other places where we have to put up with hateful and discriminatory speech.
Moreover, here we are not dealing merely with a regulation of speech, we are dealing with an absolute prohibition—a prior restraint. Prior restraints of speech are particularly inimical because they do not merely place a burden on the speaker’s ability to communicate a message; rather they erase that message before its effects can be assessed. The plurality repeatedly asserts that the prior restraint at issue here is permitted under the First Amendment “because defendants simply were enjoined from continuing a course of repetitive speech that had been judicially determined to constitute unlawful harassment in violation of the FEHA.” (Plur. opn., ante, at p. 145; see also id. at pp. 126, 140-141, 141-142, 147.) So speech that is “unlawful” is now unprotected by the state and federal Constitutions. That standard turns the world on its head. In effect, the plurality says, “The Legislature, acting in response to current popular sentiments, has carved out certain ideas from the universe of ideas and declared them to be bad ideas, and once an idea has been judicially determined to be one of these bad ideas, courts can prohibit anyone from expressing it.” I disagree.
Justice Werdegar’s concurring opinion, though it agrees the court’s analysis is fatally flawed (conc. opn., ante, at pp. 149-150) and tries harder to address the First Amendment issues, is no more persuasive. Conceding that none of the existing First Amendment doctrines standing alone permits the injunction at issue here, she carves a new exception from the First Amendment because a “contrary holding” (id. at p. 165) would mean “Lawrence’s First Amendment rights . . . outweigh the rights of the Latino plaintiffs to be free of unwanted racial discrimination.” (Id. at pp. 165-166.)
The Constitution, however, has already balanced the scales. Plaintiffs should not be subjected to racial invectives in the workplace. But this case is not, as Justice Werdegar suggests, an all-or-nothing choice between either upholding the injunction or subjecting employees to a “constant stream of [denigrating] verbiage.” (Conc. opn., ante, at p. 165, fn. omitted.) There is a *194middle ground: employees can sue and recover damages. It is hard to imagine any employer would continue to tolerate discriminatory speech in the workplace after shouldering the cost of litigation and a damage award, and, if it did, it would run the risk of paying a second award, including hefty punitive damages and attorney fees. I think that remedy is sufficient to deter any “unwanted racial discrimination.” (Id. at p. 166.)
As Justice Werdegar recognizes, this case pits freedom of speech against racial equality, and because the tension between freedom and equality cannot be reconciled, the best that can be achieved is a rough equilibrium. (Conc. opn., ante, at pp. 165, 167.) In this regard, the California Constitution strikes the appropriate balance by distinguishing between prior restraints and all other regulations of speech. Article I, section 2, subdivision (a), of the state Constitution provides: “Every person may freely speak, write and publish his or her sentiments on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of this right. A law may not restrain or abridge liberty of speech or press.” In Dailey v. Superior Court (1896) 112 Cal. 94, 97 [44 P. 458] (Dailey), discussing an earlier, almost identical version of this provision, we said, “The right of the citizen to freely speak, write, and publish his sentiments is unlimited, but he is responsible at the hands of the law for an abuse of that right. He shall have no censor over him to whom he must apply for permission to speak, write, or publish, but he shall be held accountable to the law for what he speaks, what he writes, and what he publishes. It is patent that this right to speak, write, and publish, cannot be abused until it is exercised, and before it is exercised there can be no responsibility.”
Since Dailey, we have upheld injunctions against speech, but only prescribable speech such as obscenity or fighting words, or where other compelling circumstances made injunctive relief absolutely necessary. (Cf. People ex rel. Gallo v. Acuna (1996) 14 Cal.4th 1090 [60 Cal.Rptr.2d 277, 929 P.2d 596].) No such circumstances exist here, where the speaker has merely expressed disgusting opinions and may well have ceased doing so. Forcibly prohibiting expression may only reinforce the animosities we are trying to subvert. In permitting speech, but requiring the speaker to pay damages for injurious speech, the California Constitution preserves both the freedom of the speaker and the equal dignity of the audience. This compromise not only discourages injurious speech, but may also foster positive change in the speaker’s attitudes. Accordingly, I would draw the line in the same place as the California Constitution and find the injunction at issue here to be an unconstitutional prior restraint of speech.
The court also rejects defendants’ argument that the injunction here is overly broad. Justice Werdegar’s concurring opinion does not address this *195issue other than to state that the injunction must be “sufficiently narrowed on remand to apply to the workplace only.” (Conc. opn., ante, at p. 166.) The plurality opinion recognizes that an injunction restraining speech must “burden no more speech than necessary to serve a significant government interest” (Madsen v. Women’s Health Center, Inc. (1994) 512 U.S. 753, 765 [114 S.Ct. 2516, 2525, 129 L.Ed.2d 593]), but argues that this injunction satisfies that standard. (Plur. opn., ante, at p. 146.) I disagree.
First, because we are deciding this case on a very limited record, we do not know what exactly plaintiffs’ supervisor said, how often he said it, or what the surrounding circumstances were. Moreover, we do not know whether the damages award, which defendants have chosen not to challenge, was adequate to bring an end to the conduct that created the hostile work environment. Therefore, we do not know if the broad injunction was necessary, or if a more specific one prohibiting, for example, only pervasive use of certain epithets would have sufficed. Second, the injunction does not merely prohibit plaintiffs’ supervisor from repeating his discriminatory comments in plaintiffs’ presence; rather, it prohibits him from repeating them anywhere in the workplace. The United States Supreme Court made clear in Harris that, “if the victim does not subjectively perceive the [work] environment to be abusive, the conduct has not actually altered the conditions of the victim’s employment, and there is no Title VII violation.” (Harris, supra, 510 U.S. at pp. 21-22 [114 S.Ct. at p. 370].) This standard also applies under the FEHA. (Plur. opn., ante, at p. 130.) Therefore, if an employee never learns about the use of certain words in the workplace, those words cannot create a hostile work environment for that employee. I see no reason under this standard to enjoin plaintiffs’ supervisor from expressing his discriminatory opinions to persons in the workplace who are not offended by them. In sum, even if the injunction at issue here were otherwise constitutional, it is overly broad as written and therefore invalid.
Every age has its fashionable ideas and its disfavored ideas. In the early part of this century, the public was particularly thin-skinned about communism. Courts tried to prohibit and punish the dissemination of communist ideas, but the United States Supreme Court struck down these decisions with a resounding no. (See, e.g., Gitlow v. New York (1925) 268 U.S. 652 [45 S.Ct. 625, 69 L.Ed. 1138].) Justice Holmes added the phrase “free trade in ideas” to our judicial lexicon and admonished us that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” (Abrams v. United States, supra, 250 U.S. at p. 630 [40 S.Ct. at p. 22] (dis. opn. of Holmes, J.).) In other words, the only way to fight a bad idea is with a good idea. But today this court reopens the door to censorship with a resounding yes. The Legislature is now free to prohibit the *196expression of ideas it dislikes, and courts can enforce these prohibitions with injunctions.
None of us on this court condone ethnic and racial discrimination in the workplace, but the issue in this case is speech, not just discrimination. Speech is unpleasant sometimes. It may be disgusting. It may be offensive. Contrary to the nursery rhyme, it may even be injurious. But, with few exceptions, none of which apply, the state and federal Constitutions prohibit courts from using their injunctive power as a surgical instrument to extricate disfavored ideas from the popular discourse, and this principle applies even here where the ideas in question were, from what we can tell from the limited record, both offensive and abhorrent.
One of the truths we hold to be self-evident is that a government that tells its citizens what they may say will soon be dictating what they may think. But in a country that puts such a high premium on freedom, we cannot allow ourselves to be the captives of orthodox, culturally imposed thinking patterns. Indeed, I can conceive no imprisonment so complete, no subjugation so absolute, no debasement so abject as the enslavement of the mind.
Fundamentally, this is a case about equality and freedom. Thus, it is a case about our most basic political ideals; about our highest aspirations and our greatest failures; our toughest challenges and our deepest fears. It is about a bafflingly elusive dream of equality and the freedom, not immune from abuse, to speak words that make others more than uncomfortable. It is a case about equality and freedom and the irreconcilable tension between the two. We are all the beneficiaries of the freedom the Constitution guarantees, and we all pay its costs, even though the price may sometimes be anguish.
I dissent.