Cite as: 529 U. S. 277 (2000)
Stevens, J., dissenting
speech, are presumptively invalid. Under today's opinion, a State may totally ban speech based on its secondary effects—which are defined as those effects that "happen to be associated" with speech, Boos v. Barry, 485 U. S. 312, 320- 321 (1988); see ante, at 291—yet the regulation is not presumptively invalid. Because the category of effects that "happen to be associated" with speech includes the narrower subset of effects caused by speech, today's holding has the effect of swallowing whole a most fundamental principle of First Amendment jurisprudence.
II
The plurality's mishandling of our secondary effects cases is not limited to its approval of a total ban. It compounds that error by dramatically reducing the degree to which the State's interest must be furthered by the restriction imposed on speech, and by ignoring the critical difference between secondary effects caused by speech and the incidental effects on speech that may be caused by a regulation of conduct.
In what can most delicately be characterized as an enormous understatement, the plurality concedes that "requiring dancers to wear pasties and G-strings may not greatly reduce these secondary effects." Ante, at 301. To believe that the mandatory addition of pasties and a G-string will have any kind of noticeable impact on secondary effects requires nothing short of a titanic surrender to the implausible. It would be more accurate to acknowledge, as Justice Scalia does, that there is no reason to believe that such a requirement "will at all reduce the tendency of establishments such as Kandyland to attract crime and prostitution, and hence to foster sexually transmitted disease." Ante, at 310 (opinion concurring in judgment); see also ante, at 313, n. 2 (Souter, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). Nevertheless, the plurality concludes that the "less stringent" test announced in United States v. O'Brien, 391 U. S. 367 (1968), "requires only that the regulation further the interest in
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