194
Opinion of the Court
applied in commercial speech cases, decisions that select among speakers conveying virtually identical messages are in serious tension with the principles undergirding the First Amendment. Cf. Carey v. Brown, 447 U. S. 455, 465 (1980); First Nat. Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, 435 U. S. 765, 777, 784- 785 (1978).
The second interest asserted by the Government—the derivative goal of "assisting" States with policies that disfavor private casinos—adds little to its case. We cannot see how this broadcast restraint, ambivalent as it is, might directly and adequately further any state interest in dampening consumer demand for casino gambling if it cannot achieve the same goal with respect to the similar federal interest.
Furthermore, even assuming that the state policies on which the Federal Government seeks to embellish are more coherent and pressing than their federal counterpart, § 1304 sacrifices an intolerable amount of truthful speech about lawful conduct when compared to all of the policies at stake and the social ills that one could reasonably hope such a ban to eliminate. The Government argues that petitioners' speech about private casino gambling should be prohibited in Louisiana because, "under appropriate conditions," 3 Record 628, citizens in neighboring States like Arkansas and Texas (which hosts tribal, but not private, commercial casino gambling) might hear it and make rash or costly decisions. To be sure, in order to achieve a broader objective such regulations may incidentally, even deliberately, restrict a certain amount of speech not thought to contribute significantly to the dangers with which the Government is concerned. See Fox, 492 U. S., at 480; cf. Edge, 509 U. S., at 429-430.8 But Congress' choice here was neither a rough
8 As we stated in Edge: "[A]pplying the restriction to a broadcaster such as [respondent] directly advances the governmental interest in enforcing the restriction in nonlottery States, while not interfering with the policies of lottery States like Virginia . . . . [W]e judge the validity of the restriction in this case by the relation it bears to the general problem of accom-
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