488
Souter, J., dissenting
for protected speech "works no less an infringement of . . . constitutional rights" than being prohibited from making such expenditures. 431 U. S., at 234. The fact that no prior case of this Court has applied this principle to commercial and nonideological speech simply reflects the fortuity that this is the first commercial speech subsidy case to come before us.
3
An apparent third ground for the Court's conclusion that the First Amendment is not implicated here is its assumption that respondents do not disagree with the advertisements they object to subsidizing. See ante, at 470, 471. But this assumption is doubtful and would be beside the point even if true. As the Court itself notes, ante, at 467-468, and n. 11, respondents do claim to disagree with the messages of some promotions they are being forced to fund: some of the ads promote specific varieties of plums, peaches, and nectarines marketed by respondents' competitors but not by respondents; other ads characterize California tree fruits as a generic and thus fungible commodity, whereas respondents believe that their produce is superior to most grown in California. While these points of disagreement may seem trivial to the Court, they in fact relate directly to a vendor's recognized First Amendment interest in touting his wares as he sees fit, so long as he does not mislead. Supra, at 479. Whether the "central message," ante, at 470, of the generic advertising is that all California peaches, plums, and nectar-ines are equally good, or that only the varieties and characteristics featured in the advertisements are desirable, respondents do indeed disagree with that message.
In any event, the requirement of disagreement finds no legal warrant in our compelled-speech cases. In Riley, for example, we held that the free-speech rights of charitable solicitors were infringed by a law compelling statements of fact with which the objectors could not, and did not profess to, disagree. See 487 U. S., at 797-798. See also Hurley,
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