Court Opinion

ID: 9492628
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:45:32.636357+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:55:23.791292
License: Public Domain

WILKINSON, Chief Judge,
concurring:
Speech is presumptively a national commodity. The Supreme Court has said as much in applying the First Amendment to the states. Gitlow v. New York, 268 U.S. *199652, 666, 45 S.Ct. 625, 69 L.Ed. 1138 (1925).*
Plaintiff here seeks to put this proposition to the test. She asks nothing more than to spread and celebrate the message of her faith in a large, common, open-air public space. She was denied the right to speak solely because she was not a resident of Fairfax County, but rather of an independent city surrounded by the County. To limit a forum such as this one to those who live within the jurisdiction is to balkanize our civic dialogue. Were the Freedom Riders to be denied access to public fora in the South because they came from out of state? Is a Vermonter to be denied access to an Ohio public forum if he wishes to bring attention to the problem of acid rain? Is a pro-life Ohioan to be disallowed from protesting pro-choice developments in Virginia? And are Virginians, who are concerned about garbage trucked into their state from New York, to be prohibited from protesting such actions in a New York public forum?
Speech in America cannot be that parochial. The fact that this forum is near a government complex would seemingly present an even more urgent question. The Washington metropolitan area is an especially interconnected region, nowhere more so than where traffic tie-ups are concerned. Is a speaker from one jurisdiction to be denied the right to protest the position of a neighboring governing body on the widening of the Springfield Interchange or the replacement of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge?
Surely a speaker is entitled to spread the faith or the political gospel beyond the community in which she lives. Even in the age of the Internet, there may be those who prefer to present their message face-to-face. None of this means that local governments are without recourse in dealing with open-air public fora speakers. Such fora remain subject to reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions. Clark v. Community for Creative Non-Violence, 468 U.S. 288, 293, 104 S.Ct. 3065, 82 L.Ed.2d 221 (1984). Especially with respect to matters of security, but also in maintaining the beauty and ambience of the public setting, local governments deserve latitude. The answer, I think, lies in according municipalities time, place, and manner flexibility rather than permitting them to silence altogether those who serve to connect our national speech.

 My good colleague Judge Niemeyer appears to protest this view in his dissent (see section VI). But none, of the examples he gives involve restrictions solely on non-residents in an open-air public space at the seat of government.