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Last year a riot nearly ensued when a group from Tampa's Biblical Research Center tagged after the St. Petersburg, Florida, Pride parade and picketed the St. Pete Pride Street Festival, taunting participants. This year, citing public safety concerns, St. Petersburg city officials made an off-kilter effort to avoid a repeat performance at the June 30 celebration. Their remedy, City Ordinance No. 833-G, exacerbated tensions while threatening the First Amendment rights of both Christian fundamentalists and St. Pete Pride.

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he original language of the permit issued Pride organizers by the City of St. Petersburg banned all placards, banners, and bullhorns from the "Permitted Street Closure Area," except within certain designated "free speech zones." This approach appeared to mean that banners, signs, and amplified music would have been proscribed not only for protestors, but for the St. Pete Pride Promenade itself.

Six days before the event, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Florida outlined its problems with that scheme in a letter to the St. Petersburg City Council, Mayor Rick Baker, and police chief Chuck Harmon. The civil liberties organization expressed concern not only for St. Pete Pride, but for anyone seeking to protest it on religious grounds.

"City Ordinance No. 833-G," the letter pointed out, "allows the city to create ad hoc prior restraints of free speech with every permit." Among the more troublesome features of the ordinance is that it deems anyone who violates the terms of an official event permit guilty of violating the St. Petersburg City Code, and therefore subject to arrest.

The ACLU recommended that the City of St. Petersburg "drop the notion of 'free speech zones.' The entire City should be a free speech zone. The City should clarify that event organizers have the right to control the message within the permitted area. So within the Central Avenue area from 28th to 21st Street, St. Pete Pride should be allowed to promote its message, and only its message."

The ACLU pointed out that the establishment of "free speech zones" within the festival's designated area was incompatible with the US Supreme Court's ruling in Hurley v. Irish American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group. In that 1995 decision, the high court held that the South Boston Allied War Veterans Council had the First Amendment right to control the content of its St. Patrick's Day parade by excluding a queer Irish-American march contingent. While many in the gay community regarded the decision as purely discriminatory, it did, in fact, protect the organizers of events such as St. Pete Pride from the forced inclusion of fundamentalist zealots, ex-gay ministries, and others seeking to undermine their message.

Camp X-Ray for ideas

Free-speech zoning is a constitutionally dubious proposition in a nation that purports to stand for freedom of speech in the public square, but such arrangements are hardly unprecedented. During the 2004 Democratic convention, seeking to keep riff-raff away from the coronation of Senator John Kerry as presidential candidate, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino ordered the creation of a free-speech area tucked away beneath abandoned elevated train tracks near the arena where the convention took place. (See The Guide, September 2004.) The resulting "free-speech cage," widely ridiculed and condemned, survived a court challenge. The difference between the Boston set-up and the initial terms of the St. Pete Pride permit, however, is that the latter's requirements were analogous to forcing Democrats to provide a space for right-wing Republicans on their convention floor.

By June 20, the City of St. Petersburg had dropped the term "free speech zone," and allowed marchers in the Pride Promenade to carry banners and signs, but changed few of its restrictions. The final language of the permit proscribed non-participants in the promenade from carrying "banners that extend beyond the torso of the person holding them" from the "Permitted Street Closure Area."

In challenging the city policy, the ACLU was in part upholding its tradition of defending the constitutional rights of everyone, including neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and virulent homophobes. In so doing, it joined forces with the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), an increasingly visible "legal ministry" founded in 1994. ADF's goals include helping "practicing attorneys successfully defend and reclaim religious freedom, the sanctity of human life, and traditional family values." Founders include Rev. James Dobson of Focus on the family, Rev. Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ, and Rev. D. James Kennedy of the rabidly homophobic Coral Ridge Ministries.

Both organizations felt that laws already on the books should have been sufficient to control the situation. "There are laws against assault and battery," observes Becky Steele, Regional Director of the ACLU of West Central Florida, "and against interference with the course of a parade."

According to its organizers, the fifth annual St. Pete Pride Promenade and Street Festival drew about 60,000 people; the police claim there were 40,000 attendees. Among Pride attendees, the only reported arrest was that of Shelah Walker, 56, who was charged with disorderly conduct after a drink she hurled at sign-bearing Christians spattered bystanders.

Size matters

This year's complement of about two dozen anti-gay demonstrators came from Faith Baptist churches in Primrose, Jefferson, and other small towns in Georgia. Some of their concerns are outlined at the Primrose Faith Baptist Church website, Sonsofthundr.com , in a section entitled "The Horrors of the Sodomite Lifestyle."

Several of the protestors-- Joshua Pettigrew, 21; Douglas C. Pitts, 50; Willie Lee Holt, 31; and Francis W. Primavera, 25-- were placed under arrest and held overnight. The Faith Baptist activists had carried foam-board placards inscribed with "Adam and Eve, NOT Adam and Steve" and other examples of evangelical wit, sometimes holding them above their heads. Police said the signs, which were about six inches broader than the torsos of their bearers, violated the terms of the pride permit.

For the most part, the demonstrators were ignored along the parade route. Becky Steele, who marched with a group of Pinellas County ACLU members, says that as her contingent passed, some of the Faith Baptist congregants shouted, "Why don't you ever defend the free speech of Christians?"

"Our project manager walked over to them," Steele recalls, "and explained that for the past week we had been doing just that. It's part of our mission. But they couldn't believe we were serious. They said, 'That's just a front.' They assumed we had to have some ulterior motive."

None of the arrested Faith Baptist Church members has sought legal aid from the ACLU.

Steele says she was pleased that St. Pete Pride took place approximately as planned, and that the City of St. Petersburg had been willing revise at least some of its terms. She is not convinced, however, that city officials fully understand what was at stake.

"We would have been more pleased with the outcome," she notes, "if the city had acknowledged St. Pete Pride's First Amendment right to control the message of its own event."