558
Syllabus
(b) The selection of contingents to make a parade is entitled to First Amendment protection. Parades such as petitioners' are a form of protected expression because they include marchers who are making some sort of collective point, not just to each other but to bystanders along the way. Cf., e. g., Gregory v. Chicago, 394 U. S. 111, 112. Moreover, such protection is not limited to a parade's banners and songs, but extends to symbolic acts. See, e. g., West Virginia Bd. of Ed. v. Barnette, 319 U. S. 624, 632, 642. Although the Council has been rather lenient in admitting participants to its parade, a private speaker does not forfeit constitutional protection simply by combining multifarious voices, by failing to edit their themes to isolate a specific message as the exclusive subject matter of the speech, or by failing to generate, as an original matter, each item featured in the communication. Thus, petitioners are entitled to protection under the First Amendment. GLIB's participation as a unit in the parade was equally expressive, since the organization was formed to celebrate its members' sexual identities and for related purposes. Pp. 568-570. (c) The Massachusetts law does not, as a general matter, violate the First or Fourteenth Amendments. Its provisions are well within a legislature's power to enact when it has reason to believe that a given group is being discriminated against. And the statute does not, on its face, target speech or discriminate on the basis of its content. Pp. 571-572. (d) The state court's application, however, had the effect of declaring the sponsors' speech itself to be the public accommodation. Since every participating parade unit affects the message conveyed by the private organizers, the state courts' peculiar application of the Massachusetts law essentially forced the Council to alter the parade's expressive content and thereby violated the fundamental First Amendment rule that a speaker has the autonomy to choose the content of his own message and, conversely, to decide what not to say. Petitioners' claim to the benefit of this principle is sound, since the Council selects the expressive units of the parade from potential participants and clearly decided to exclude a message it did not like from the communication it chose to make, and that is enough to invoke its right as a private speaker to shape its expression by speaking on one subject while remaining silent on another, free from state interference. The constitutional violation is not saved by Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. v. FCC, 512 U. S. 622. The Council is a speaker in its own right; a parade does not consist of individual, unrelated segments that happen to be transmitted together for individual selection by members of the audience; and there is no assertion here that some speakers will be destroyed in the absence of
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