I'm just not used to it being in the United States. From the June 18, 2009 San Jose Mercury-News:
DETROIT — A federal judge today denied an evangelical Christian group's request for permission to hand out literature on sidewalks at an Arab festival in the heart of the Detroit area's Middle Eastern community.
U.S. District Judge Nancy Edmunds denied Anaheim, Calif.-based Arabic Christian Perspective's request for a temporary restraining order.
The group describes itself in its court filing as "a national ministry established for the purpose of proclaiming the Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ to Muslims ... (that) travels around the country attending and distributing Christian literature at Muslim festivals and mosques."
A lawyer for the group said it would seek a permanent injunction against the city of Dearborn.
"It's not over," said Robert J. Muise of the Thomas More Law Center, an Ann Arbor-based Christian rights advocacy group.
Another lawyer on the case said the Dearborn officials action could be part of what he described as a broader Muslim legal attack on critics of Islam in our "Judeo-Christian nation."
"Muslims are using the courts in this country to stop our free speech rights," said William J. Becker Jr., a Los Angeles attorney who has represented a number of prominent critics of Islam.
The 14th annual Dearborn Arab International Festival is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of visitors Friday through Sunday to the city that has the Detroit area's greatest concentration of Arab-Americans.
Wow. How many parts of the First Amendment can this judge violate at once?
1. Public streets can't be used for a protected form of free speech.
2. And this is a violation of the freedom of religious exercise clause, since proselytizing is a fundamental part of the Christian faith.
3. And arguably a violation of religious establishment clause, since it would appear that there is a distinct penalty assessed against a particular religion.
And what makes this especially silly is that even by progressive notions of not offending, this doesn't make sense. A lot of Arab-Americans are Christians; that's one of the reasons that a lot of them came here. I have attended church with Arab-Americans in the past, and I know that they aren't particularly unique.
UPDATE: Professor Volokh in email points out that the restrictions in question are content-neutral; at this point, there is no evidence that Christians are being especially disfavored. I confess that I am a bit sensitive on this subject, simply because Islam is favored by the left (because they have imagined that Bush was making war on Islam), and Christianity an especially disfavored religion for the left (because we won't get with the program on homosexuality, abortion, and Gaea worship).
And while it is true that prohibiting leafleting does not preclude other available means of expressing an opinion--it is also true that the ACLU doesn't seem to ever recognize the validity of this approach when it comes to something like virtual child pornography, where they argued that because the law was overbroad, and therefore might apply to some serious artistic works, that therefore the law was unconstitutional. (There were no alternatives in making a film that wouldn't run afoul of the law?) I mean, you don't have to burn a flag to express your opinion, do you? According to the ACLU, alternate means of expressing an opinion just aren't adequate. (Except, of course, when wearing a T-shirt might offend homosexuals--then you have to shut up--at least, according to Judge Stephen Reinhardt, who is married to the ACLU of Southern California's director.)
I also find the notion that leafleting can be forbidden because of crowd control issues--but going out into the crowd to talk to people isn't--is absurd. Go into a crowd and start talking to people about something as emotional as religion, and I suspect that it is going to produce some pretty heated discussions--which will slow the flow of traffic. Leaflets, on the other hand, get stuffed into a pocket, producing no real change in traffic flow.
This street festival is supposedly different from a public street because there's some sort of public event being carried on. Somehow, I'm hard pressed to see how this makes it equivalent to a courthouse, a legislative body, a jail, or one of the other places where government is ordinarily granted additional power to restrict speech because they are performing a landlord function. Considering that the Supreme Court ruled in the Pruneyard decision that a private property owner may not exclude persons gathering signatures in a shopping center, because this is a form of public forum, it is hard to see how the government has authority to prohibit leafleting on public streets.
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