Supreme Court says Boston violated First Amendment rights of group seeking to raise Christian flag outside City Hall

Washington CNN — The Supreme Court unanimously ruled Monday that Boston violated the First Amendment rights of a group seeking to briefly raise a Christian flag atop a city flagpole outside of City Hall as a part of a city program celebrating Boston’s greater community. Under a more narrow definition of government speech, Alito wrote that it occurs “if – but only if” a government “purposefully expresses a message of its own through persons authorized to speak on its behalf.” He said the flag program in Boston “cannot possibly constitute government speech” because the city never deputized private speakers and that the various flags flown under the program “reflected a dizzying and contradictory array of perspectives that cannot be understood to express the message of a single speaker.” Boston occasionally allows private groups to fly flags, which are often flags from different countries, on one of the flag poles as part of a program to celebrate various Boston communities. “Government cannot censor religious viewpoints under the guise of government speech.” In supporting Shurtleff, David Cole, the national legal director of the ACLU, argued in The Washington Post that “no reasonable observer would understand flying Camp Constitution’s flag – for just one hour on a single day – to be the government’s speech.” He said that like the other flags flown before, the flag would be seen as the group’s flag “and as such, the city can’t turn it down because the flag is religious.” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar also told the justices that the flag-raising program did not amount to government speech in part because the city typically exercised no control over the choice of flags. Douglas Hallward-Driemeier, an attorney representing Boston, told the justices that the flagpole “that stands prominently at the City’s seat of government is a means by which the City communicates its own message and has not simply been turned over to private parties as a forum to pronounce their own messages, including those antithetical to the City’s.” He said that the flag-raising program’s goals were to commemorate flags from many countries and communities to create an environment in the city where “everyone feels included and is treated with respect.” “In a democratic system like ours, it is critically important that governments retain the right and ability to speak on behalf of their constituents and take positions and privilege certain viewpoints when doing so,” Hallward-Driemeier said.