Louisiana joins legal brief
opposing policy denying religious group’s First Amendment right to advertise
BATON ROUGE, LA – Louisiana
Attorney General joined 20 of his colleagues in filing a legal brief opposing
the Hillsborough (FL) transit authority’s policy denying the First Amendment
rights of a religious group to advertise on public transportation.
“Our Nation is the world’s greatest beacon of freedom because our founders, and
patriots after them, enshrined religious liberty as a guiding principle. The
right to religious freedom is under attack not only by woke mobs and their
allies in the legacy media, but also by overreaching government,” said Attorney
General Landry. “HART’s policy banning religious speech runs afoul of Supreme
Court cases and the Constitution. I hope our legal efforts will prevail and the
First Amendment will once again be protected from this unconstitutional
viewpoint discrimination and unreasonable content-based restriction.”
In October 2020, an Orthodox Jewish synagogue submitted an ad to the
Hillsborough Area Regional Transit Authority (HART) seeking to advertise its
annual celebration of Chanukah. HART rejected the ad because it was religious;
then after an appeal to HART’s CEO, HART said it would run the ad only if it
censored all references to a central feature of the Jewish celebration of
Chanukah: the menorah. In February 2021, the synagogue filed a lawsuit against
HART in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida.
As noted in the amicus brief filed by Attorney General Landry and his
colleagues – HART lumps in “religious affiliation advertising” with others
forms of advertising it forbids: ads for “tobacco, alcohol, or related
products” and ads containing “profane language, obscene materials,” “images of
nudity,” or “depiction[s] of graphic violence,” among others.
By treating them alike, the
attorneys general argue, HART sends the perverse message that religious speech
is too controversial, too taboo, and too dangerous for public discussion – a
notion that flies in the face of our nation’s history and tradition celebrating
religious discourse and the First Amendment’s dual guarantee of the freedoms of
speech and religious exercise.
Attorney General Landry joined
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall and the attorneys general from Alaska,
Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi,
Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee,
Texas, Utah, and Virginia in filing the amicus brief at the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the 11th Judicial Circuit.
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