Supreme Court smacks 9th Circus, tells it that First Amendment applies to church signs, too.

Short version on this one (Reed v. Town of Gilbert): there’s a church in Arizona with no fixed abode yet that has to go around and rent temporary space for services.  They let their congregants know the latest location via temporary signage; and the town got all bent out of shape over this.  Shockingly, the 9th Circuit can’t read the plain text of the First Amendment, and just as shockingly* the Supreme Court had to smack the 9th Circuit again:

In its opinion, the Supreme Court found that Gilbert’s Sign Code discriminated against certain content without any legitimate governmental interest. The high court threw out the test used by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to claim that Good News Community Church’s signs expressed a less valuable form of speech than a city councilmember seeking re-election or an HOA promoting a Friday fish fry.

Unanimously smack, might I add. It takes a good deal of work to get a 9-0 Supreme Court decision, but the 9th Circus is always up to the challenge. Jon Gabriel also notes in the link above that the idiots in this case (the town, and the two judges on the 9th Circuit that ruled for the town) are either conservatives and/or Bush appointees.  Yeah, this is why we can’t have nice things…

Moe Lane

*As in, ‘not-shockingly.’ Everybody knows that the Ninth Circuit is always creating rulings that the Supreme Court later has to scrape up off the sidewalk.