396
Opinion of the Court
ling interests; it plainly is not. An ordinance not limited to the favored topics, for example, would have precisely the same beneficial effect. In fact the only interest distinctively served by the content limitation is that of displaying the city council's special hostility towards the particular biases thus singled out.8 That is precisely what the First Amendment forbids. The politicians of St. Paul are entitled to express that hostility—but not through the means of imposing unique limitations upon speakers who (however benightedly) disagree.
* * *
Let there be no mistake about our belief that burning a cross in someone's front yard is reprehensible. But St. Paul has sufficient means at its disposal to prevent such behavior without adding the First Amendment to the fire.
The judgment of the Minnesota Supreme Court is reversed, and the case is remanded for proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.
It is so ordered.
8 A plurality of the Court reached a different conclusion with regard to the Tennessee antielectioneering statute considered earlier this Term in Burson v. Freeman, 504 U. S. 191 (1992). In light of the "logical connection" between electioneering and the State's compelling interest in preventing voter intimidation and election fraud—an inherent connection borne out by a "long history" and a "widespread and time-tested consensus," id., at 206, 208, n. 10, 211—the plurality concluded that it was faced with one of those "rare case[s]" in which the use of a facially content-based restriction was justified by interests unrelated to the suppression of ideas, id., at 211; see also id., at 213 (Kennedy, J., concurring). Justice White and Justice Stevens are therefore quite mistaken when they seek to convert the Burson plurality's passing comment that "[t]he First Amendment does not require States to regulate for problems that do not exist," id., at 207, into endorsement of the revolutionary proposition that the suppression of particular ideas can be justified when only those ideas have been a source of trouble in the past. Post, at 405 (White, J., concurring in judgment); post, at 434 (Stevens, J., concurring in judgment).
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