Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston, Inc.

Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston, Inc., legal case in which, on June 19, 1995, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously (9–0) upheld the right of parade organizers to exclude groups holding beliefs that they disapprove of; in this case, the excluded group consisted of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals.

At the heart of the case was a Massachusetts law forbidding discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in a place of public accommodation. A coalition of gay and lesbian groups had successfully argued in state court (at both the trial court and state supreme court levels) that the law applied to the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade in Boston. According to the courts, because the parade was a public event, the council organizing the event could not discriminate (in fact, the coalition had marched uneventfully in the 1992 parade). On appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice David Souter spoke for a unanimous bench in reversing these decisions, holding that the state’s public-accommodation law could not be applied to the expressive decisions of a private parade: the free speech rights of the parade organizers permitted them to include or exclude whomever they pleased.