Good News Club V. Milford Central School - Majority Opinion

Majority Opinion

When the government establishes a "limited public forum," it is not required to permit any and all speech within that forum. It may "reserve its forum for certain groups or for the discussion of certain topics". However, the government may not discriminate against speech on the basis of its viewpoint, and any restriction it imposes must be reasonable in light of the purpose served by the forum.

The Court saw no distinction between the viewpoint discrimination in this case and the viewpoint discrimination in two of its earlier cases: Lamb's Chapel v. Center Moriches Union Free School District, 508 U.S. 384 (1993), and Rosenberger v. University of Virginia, 515 U.S. 819 (1995). In Lamb's Chapel, the Court held that a school district violated the First Amendment's Free Speech Clause when it excluded a private group from presenting films at the school solely on the basis of the religious perspective of the films on family values. And in Rosenberger, the Court held that a university's refusal to fund a student publication because of that publication's religious perspective violated the Free Speech Clause. Milford's exclusion is indistinguishable from the exclusions at issue in Lamb's Chapel and Rosenberger, and so the Court did not need to decide "whether it is unreasonable in light of the purposes served by the forum."

"Milford has opened its limited public forum to activities that serve a variety of purposes, including events pertaining to the welfare of the community." Milford had asserted before the Second Circuit that it would have allowed a public group to use Aesop's fables to impart moral values to children. Milford also allowed the Boy Scouts to "influence a boy's character, development, and spiritual growth". Likewise, the Good News Club also sought to teach moral values to children, albeit from an explicitly Christian viewpoint.

According to the majority, the Court's prior decisions in Lamb's Chapel and Rosenberger determined the outcome of the Good News Club's free speech claim. In Lamb's Chapel, the Court had ruled that a different New York public school had engaged in unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination when it forbade a religious group from using its facilities to show films that taught "family values from a Christian perspective". It saw no difference between the films that the religious group in Lamb's Chapel proposed to show and the songs and lessons the Good News Club used in this case. And in Rosenberger, the fact that a state university subsidized the publication of some student newspapers but refused to subsidize a student newspaper with a religious viewpoint was also unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.

In spite of these decisions, the Second Circuit had ruled in this case that the religious nature of the Good News Club's message meant that it "fell outside the bounds of" speech related to "pure moral and character development", and hence was not entitled to First Amendment protection. The majority on the Supreme Court "disagreed that something that is 'quintessentially religious' or 'decidedly religious in nature' cannot also be characterized properly as the teaching of morals and character development from a particular viewpoint. What matters for purposes of the Free Speech Clause is that we can see no logical difference in kind between the invocation of Christianity by the Club and the invocation of teamwork, loyalty, or patriotism by other associations to provide a foundation for their lessons." Instruction related to morals and values from a religious perspective does not somehow "taint" that instruction so as to alter the viewpoint such instruction takes. Accordingly, Milford's exclusion of the Good News Club constituted unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.