390
Opinion of the Court
U. S. C. § 242; 42 U. S. C. §§ 1981, 1982. Where the government does not target conduct on the basis of its expressive content, acts are not shielded from regulation merely because they express a discriminatory idea or philosophy.
These bases for distinction refute the proposition that the selectivity of the restriction is "even arguably 'conditioned upon the sovereign's agreement with what a speaker may intend to say.' " Metromedia, Inc. v. San Diego, 453 U. S. 490, 555 (1981) (Stevens, J., dissenting in part) (citation omitted). There may be other such bases as well. Indeed, to validate such selectivity (where totally proscribable speech is at issue) it may not even be necessary to identify any particular "neutral" basis, so long as the nature of the content discrimination is such that there is no realistic possibility that official suppression of ideas is afoot. (We cannot think of any First Amendment interest that would stand in the way of a State's prohibiting only those obscene motion pictures with blue-eyed actresses.) Save for that limitation, the regulation of "fighting words," like the regulation of noisy speech, may address some offensive instances and leave other, equally offensive, instances alone. See Posadas de Puerto Rico, 478 U. S., at 342-343.6
6 Justice Stevens cites a string of opinions as supporting his assertion that "selective regulation of speech based on content" is not presumptively invalid. Post, at 421-422. Analysis reveals, however, that they do not support it. To begin with, three of them did not command a majority of the Court, Young v. American Mini Theatres, Inc., 427 U. S. 50, 63-73 (1976) (plurality opinion); FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 U. S. 726, 744- 748 (1978) (plurality opinion); Lehman v. Shaker Heights, 418 U. S. 298 (1974) (plurality opinion), and two others did not even discuss the First Amendment, Morales v. Trans World Airlines, Inc., 504 U. S. 374 (1992); Jacob Siegel Co. v. FTC, 327 U. S. 608 (1946). In any event, all that their contents establish is what we readily concede: that presumptive invalidity does not mean invariable invalidity, leaving room for such exceptions as reasonable and viewpoint-neutral content-based discrimination in nonpublic forums, see Lehman, supra, at 301-304; see also Cornelius v. NAACP Legal Defense & Ed. Fund, Inc., 473 U. S. 788, 806 (1985), or with respect to certain speech by government employees, see Broadrick v. Oklahoma,
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