16
MOODY v. NETCHOICE, LLC
Opinion of the Court
of programming) is itself expressive, and intrusion into that
activity must be specially justified under the First Amendment.
The capstone of those precedents came in Hurley v. IrishAmerican Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston, Inc.,
515 U. S. 557 (1995), when the Court considered (of all
things) a parade. The question was whether Massachusetts
could require the organizers of a St. Patrick’s Day parade
to admit as a participant a gay and lesbian group seeking
to convey a message of “pride.” Id., at 561. The Court held
unanimously that the First Amendment precluded that
compulsion. The “selection of contingents to make a parade,” it explained, is entitled to First Amendment protection, no less than a newspaper’s “presentation of an edited
compilation of [other persons’] speech.” Id., at 570 (citing
Tornillo, 418 U. S., at 258). And that meant the State could
not tell the parade organizers whom to include. Because
“every participating unit affects the message,” said the
Court, ordering the group’s admittance would “alter the expressive content of the[ ] parade.” Hurley, 515 U. S., at 572–
573. The parade’s organizers had “decided to exclude a
message [they] did not like from the communication [they]
chose to make,” and that was their decision alone. Id., at
574.
On two other occasions, the Court distinguished Tornillo
and its progeny for the flip-side reason—because in those
cases the compelled access did not affect the complaining
party’s own expression. First, in PruneYard Shopping Center v. Robins, 447 U. S. 74 (1980), the Court rejected a shopping mall’s First Amendment challenge to a California law
requiring it to allow members of the public to distribute
handbills on its property. The mall owner did not claim
that he (or the mall) was engaged in any expressive activity.
Indeed, as the PG&E Court later noted, he “did not even
allege that he objected to the content of the pamphlets”
passed out at the mall. 475 U. S., at 12. Similarly, in