WASHINGTON — Religious missionaries and political activists will have more freedom to speak out in Yosemite, Great Smoky Mountains and other national parks under an important appellate court ruling.
In an expansive First Amendment decision, a key appellate court struck down a long-standing National Park Service requirement that activists obtain permits before they demonstrate, distribute brochures or engage in other “expressive” activities in parks.
“These regulations penalize a substantial amount of speech that does not impinge on the government’s interests,” wrote Judge Janice Rogers Brown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
The court’s decision specifically involved Mount Rushmore National Park in South Dakota, where Michael Boardley and others were initially blocked in 2007 from distributing material praising Jesus Christ and the Gospel.
Boardley succeeded in convincing the three-judge appellate panel that the National Park Service’s speech-permit requirement violated First Amendment free-speech guarantees.
Consequently, the decision, quietly released Friday, opens doors wider at all 391 units of the national park system.
California’s Yosemite National Park, for instance, currently issues about 10 speech-related permits a year, park spokesman Scott Gediman said Monday. A table positioned near the visitors center in Yosemite Valley stocked with Jehovah’s Witnesses brochures exemplifies the activities currently requiring permits.
Similarly, Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and North Carolina issued 92 permits for church services and five permits for people distributing literature last year, park ranger Bob Wightman said Monday.
Judge Brown cited several hypothetical examples, including a Girl Scout leader who musters her scouts at Glacier National Park in Montana and “proceeds to lecture them about the effects of global warming.” This could be construed as a “gathering” that needs a permit, the judge reasoned.
“It is offensive, not only to the values protected by the First Amendment, but to the very notion of a free society, that … a citizen must first inform the government of her desire to speak to her neighbors and then obtain a permit,” Brown noted, citing an earlier Supreme Court ruling.
