A federal judge has blocked a new Illinois law that allows the state to penalize anti-abortion counseling centers if they use deception to interfere with patients seeking the procedure.
A federal judge has blocked a new Illinois law that allows the state to penalize anti-abortion counseling centers if they use deception to interfere with patients seeking the procedure.
I don’t doubt your sincerity. But I think your legal analysis is wrong.
The correct standard here is not strict scrutiny, it is intermediate scrutiny. This is a much more permissive standard that applies to all commercial speech. And it allows restrictions on what one can say, in order to prevent deceptive practices like those I described.
The Supreme Court described their approach to commercial speech in 1980 (my emphasis):
The Illinois law bans deceptive speech by certain companies trying to gain clients, and therefore it does not violate the First Amendment.
Actually, it’s your legal analysis that is wrong. Because your analysis begs the very question that the court is trying to answer: is their speech protected?
The answer is right in the quote by the Supreme Court. Commercial speech is not protected if it’s misleading. So by definition, a law that bans deceptive speech is constitutional.
In the case of these plaintiffs, maybe their speech is deceptive and maybe it isn’t. That’s up to a jury to determine. But either way, the law stands.
In other words, it’s entirely possible that their speech is not deceptive but someone else’s is deceptive. The law would only apply to the latter.
You’re assuming facts that have yet to be adjudicated.
If the relevant facts are yet to be adjudicated, then there was no basis for an injunction against this law.
Unless, of course, it were preliminary.
A preliminary injunction must be based on the strong likelihood that the plaintiffs will prevail.
If there are not any relevant facts yet, then there is likewise no basis even for a preliminary injunction.
Who said the facts don’t exist?