Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston, 515 U.S. 557 (1995), was a landmark decision of the US Supreme Court regarding free speech rights, specifically the rights of groups to determine what message their activities convey to the public. The Court ruled that private organizations, even if they were planning on and had permits for a public demonstration, were permitted to exclude groups if those groups presented a message contrary to the one the organizing group wanted to convey. Addressing the specific issues of the case, the Court found that private citizens organizing a public demonstration may not be compelled by the state to include groups who impart a message the organizers do not want to be presented by their demonstration, even if the intent of the state was to prevent discrimination.
Background
From 1901 until 1947, the city of Boston, Massachusetts, sponsored public celebrations of St. Patrick's Day and Evacuation Day, which marks the departure of British troops from the city in 1776, on or about March 17. Following 1947's events, Mayor James Michael Curley gave authority for organizing the celebratory parade to the South Boston Allied War Veterans Council, a group of unincorporated private citizens selected from a variety of Boston veterans' groups. The South Boston Allied War Veterans Council was the only group to apply for a parade permit until 1992.
In that year, the Irish-American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston (GLIB) requested that it be allowed to march in the parade alongside the usual participating groups. GLIB argued that it was not a group primarily aimed at conveying a "gay, lesbian, and bisexual message". They said their members were Irish descendants who happen to be gay, lesbian, and bisexual, and who are proud of both their sexual orientation and their Irish ancestral nationality. On March 1, the Council denied GLIB permission to march in the parade. Massachusetts Governor William Weld supported GLIB's position. Boston Mayor Ray Flynn tried without success to broker a compromise. GLIB offered to limit its participation to 25 marchers and police their behavior, winning Flynn's support. The Council voted "overwhelmingly" to reject GLIB's proposal. GLIB sued the Council, the city, and Flynn, and asked the court to compel the Council to allow them to march, citing a Massachusetts law that forbade "discrimination or restriction on account of ... sexual orientation ... relative to the admission of any person to, or treatment in any place of public accommodation, resort or amusement." On March 11, Judge Hiller B. Zobel issued an order restraining the Council from prohibiting GLIB from marching, and the Council did not appeal. GLIB marched in the parade, which the Boston Globe described as "a 5-mile gauntlet of hostility that sometimes threatened to erupt into wide-scale violence" where the GLIB marchers "faced an outpouring of vituperation that spanned generational lines." Several smoke bombs were tossed into their midst. In an editorial the paper concluded that "Despite Sunday's epithets and excesses, the parade went off relatively well", though its reporter decried the "revisionist history ... of wishful thinkers already trying to claim that aw, the crowd reaction to the gay marchers wasn't that bad".