492
Souter, J., dissenting
government. Edenfield v. Fane, 507 U. S., at 770; Board of Trustees of State Univ. of N. Y. v. Fox, 492 U. S. 469, 480 (1989). In this case, the Secretary has failed to establish that the challenged advertising programs satisfy any of these three prongs of the Central Hudson test.
A
The express purposes of the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937 (AMAA or Act), 7 U. S. C. § 601 et seq., including the advertising programs established under it, are to stabilize markets for covered agricultural products and maintain the prices received by farmers. §§ 602(1), (4); see also Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996 (FAIR Act) §§ 501(b)(1), (3), Pub. L. 104-127, 110 Stat. 888, 1030 (finding by Congress that the purpose of agricultural commodity promotion laws is to maintain and expand the market for covered commodities).7 It is doubtless true that at a general level these are substantial government interests, and unless there were some reason to doubt that undue market instability or income fluctuation has in fact affected a given segment of the economy, governmental
Corp., 463 U. S. 60, 66-68 (1983). The concept of commercial speech would be reduced to a relic if the threshold for imposing strict scrutiny were reached simply because certain advertisements evoke vaguely nostalgic themes of indeterminate political import or because the hypersensitive may see the specter of sex in the film of a child eating a peach.
7 A subtitle of the FAIR Act, which was enacted on April 4, 1996, authorizes promotion and advertising orders for any agricultural commodity. Its procedural mechanisms are similar to those put in place by the AMAA, although there is one noticeable difference (other than breadth of coverage) between the two laws: orders issued under the FAIR Act, unlike those under the AMAA, must be national in scope. FAIR Act §§ 511-526, 110 Stat. 1032-1048. The FAIR Act does not, however, affect or pre-empt any other federal or state law, such as the AMAA, authorizing promotion or research relating to an agricultural commodity. § 524, id., at 1047. The FAIR Act also includes new findings in support of "commodity promotion laws," including the advertising provisions of the AMAA. § 501, id., at 1029.
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