Fowler V. Rhode Island - Decision

Decision

Justice Douglas delivered the decision of the Court. In it, he wrote that the Court was putting aside "the problems presented by the Davis case and its offspring" because there was one aspect of the case that undercut all others, requiring the Court to reverse the judgment and rule in favor of Fowler. Douglas wrote that the concession by the State of Rhode Island that the meeting in question was a religious one and the further concession that the ordinance did not prohibit church services in the park plainly showed that a religious service of Jehovah's Witnesses was treated differently than a religious service of other sects. In the opinion of the Court, that amounted to the state preferring some religious groups over the Jehovah's Witnesses.

Justice Douglas cited the precedent of Niemotko v. Maryland in which there was similarly "a public park, open to all religious groups, was denied Jehovah's Witnesses because of the dislike which the local officials had of these people and their views." In that case, the Court had held the prosecution of Niemotko to be a discrimination that was prohibited by the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

Douglas wrote

it is no business of courts to say that what is a religious practice or activity for one group is not religion under the protection of the First Amendment. Nor is it in the competence of courts under our constitutional scheme to approve, disapprove, classify, regulate, or in any manner control sermons delivered at religious meetings. Sermons are as much a part of a religious service as prayers. They cover a wide range and have as great a diversity as the Bible or other Holy Book from which they commonly take their texts. To call the words which one minister speaks to his congregation a sermon, immune from regulation, and the words of another minister an address, subject to regulation, is merely an indirect way of preferring one religion over another. That would be precisely the effect here if we affirmed this conviction in the face of the concession made during oral argument.