762
Opinion of the Court
content-based restrictions on speech. See Lamb's Chapel, supra, at 394-395; Widmar, supra, at 271. Whether that interest is implicated here, however, is a different question. And we do not write on a blank slate in answering it. We have twice previously addressed the combination of private religious expression, a forum available for public use, content-based regulation, and a State's interest in complying with the Establishment Clause. Both times, we have struck down the restriction on religious content. Lamb's Chapel, supra; Widmar, supra.
In Lamb's Chapel, a school district allowed private groups to use school facilities during off-hours for a variety of civic, social, and recreational purposes, excluding, however, religious purposes. We held that even if school property during off-hours was not a public forum, the school district violated an applicant's free-speech rights by denying it use of the facilities solely because of the religious viewpoint of the program it wished to present. 508 U. S., at 390-395. We rejected the district's compelling-state-interest Establishment Clause defense (the same made here) because the school property was open to a wide variety of uses, the district was not directly sponsoring the religious group's activity, and "any benefit to religion or to the Church would have been no more than incidental." Id., at 395. The Lamb's Chapel reasoning applies a fortiori here, where the property at issue is not a school but a full-fledged public forum.
Lamb's Chapel followed naturally from our decision in Widmar, in which we examined a public university's exclusion of student religious groups from facilities available to other student groups. There also we addressed official discrimination against groups who wished to use a "generally open forum" for religious speech. 454 U. S., at 269. And there also the State claimed that its compelling interest in complying with the Establishment Clause justified the content-based restriction. We rejected the defense because
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