Appeals court stays court order on Christian proselytizing

Despite a lower court ruling upholding restrictions on proselytizing at an Arab festival in Dearborn this past weekend, a Christian ministry was allowed to walk around and hand out leaflets urging the predominately Muslim festival goers to convert to Christianity because the appeals court issued a last-minute stay of that court order pending appeal of the ruling.

The Dearborn Arab International Festival had allowed such leafleting to happen in past years, but last year decided that because the festival had grown so large they wanted to restrict the handing out of literature to a particular part of the festival grounds. All groups, whether religious or not, were restricted to handing out literature from tables near the entrance.

Because the festival organizers and the police were treating all organizations equally with this rule, including Muslim organizations, and because the rule was aimed solely at leafleting and not speaking to people or wearing clothing with a message on it, the district court judge ruled that this was a permissible “time, place and manner” restriction that did not violate the First Amendment.

This appeals court ruling does not overturn that decision, but it did place a temporary order forbidding the enforcement of that rule at this year’s festival while the plaintiffs appeal the ruling. As always, such injunctions are based on four criteria that the court must consider:

“(1) whether the movant has shown a strong likelihood of success on the merits; (2) whether the movant will suffer irreparable harm if the injunction is not issued; (3) whether the issuance of the injunction would cause substantial harm to others; and (4) whether the public interest would be served by issuing the injunction.

The key legal question turns on a very narrow, technical argument over the application of a particular precedent. The appeals court says that precedent supports restricting leafleting within the “core area” of the festival, but it may not support also banning distribution of literature in the “outer perimeter” or “buffer zone” outside the core area.

The court is not making a final ruling on that question, but it did conclude that there is a reasonable chance that the plaintiffs may succeed in their arguments during appeal and therefore the injunction was justified.

In related news, two other Christian preachers — apparently not affiliated with the plaintiff in this suit — were arrested for disorderly conduct at the festival on Friday. The men who were arrested deny doing anything to justify the arrest, saying they were only talking to people as everyone else was doing.

Unfortunately, the charge of disorderly conduct is often used by police as a catch-all charge to get rid of problems they don’t want to deal with. There are dozens of cases every year, at the very least, where someone is charged with disorderly conduct for exercising their First Amendment rights and the criminal charges are later dismissed. Without footage of what the men were actually doing, we can’t know whether those charges were justified or not.