1) I did not read the whole ruling, but it says not one damned word about these places being allowed to lie to women. Here's what the law stated:
Under the ordinance,
"[a] limited-service pregnancy center must provide its clients
and potential clients with a disclaimer substantially to the
effect that the center does not provide or make referral for
abortion or birth-control services." Id. § 3-502(a). This disclaimer
must be made through one or more "easily readable"
signs that are "conspicuously posted in the center’s waiting
room" and written in English and Spanish. Id. § 3-502(b). The
failure to comply with the terms of the ordinance is punishable
by a citation carrying a maximum civil penalty of $150.
2) The Pregnancy Center, one such establishment, argued that this ordinance unfairly infringed upon their right to the freedom of speech by requiring them to tacitly support abortion as a moral choice. The city did not argue that they weren't compelling them to "speak" against their principles, but instead argued that they had the right to regulate it as commercial speech, the same legal theory that lets us regulate advertising claims and the like. However:
The Supreme Court has defined commercial speech as "expression
related solely to the economic interests of the
speaker and its audience." Cent. Hudson Gas & Elec. Corp.
v. Pub. Serv. Comm’n of N.Y., 447 U.S. 557, 561 (1980).
Stated in another way, the hallmark of commercial speech is
that it "does no more than propose a commercial transaction."
As such, the city's reasoning is kinda bullshit because:
there is no indication that
the Pregnancy Center is motivated by any economic interest
or that it is proposing any commercial transaction. The Pregnancy
Center seeks to provide free information about pregnancy,
abortion, and birth control as informed by a religious
and political belief. This kind of ideologically driven speech
has routinely been afforded the highest levels of First Amendment
protection, even when accompanied by offers of commercially
valuable services.
Likewise, the city's other argument, that it was like the disclosure laws for abortion clinics, was similarly shaky:
The differing contexts of the speech restrictions in those
cases, however, render the cases inapplicable to the compelled
speech before us. In Casey, the mandatory disclosures focused
on the speech of licensed medical professionals, and the regulations
were upheld because, even though they implicated a
physician’s right not to speak, they did so "only as part of the
practice of medicine, subject to reasonable licensing and regulation
by the State." Casey, 505 U.S. at 884. More particularly,
the regulations there were permissible because they
facilitated the process of obtaining a patient’s informed consent
prior to performing a medical procedure. Thus the regulation
of such professional speech was imposed incidental to the
broader governmental regulation of a profession and was justified
by this larger context. In contrast, the pregnancy centers
that are subject to Ordinance 09-252 do not practice medicine,
are not staffed by licensed professionals, and need not satisfy
the informed consent requirement.3
As to the city's compelling interest, they simply could not prove it:
Here, the record establishes, at most, only isolated
instances of misconduct by pregnancy centers generally, and,
as the City concedes, none by the Pregnancy Center itself.
Indeed, the record contains no evidence that any woman has
been misled into believing that any pregnancy center subject
to Ordinance 09-252 was a medical clinic or that a woman in
Baltimore delayed seeking medical services because of such
a misconception. The City instead cites allegations of deceptive
practices occurring in other locations or second-hand
reports of "stories about harassment." The City’s failure to
provide more than speculative evidence of problems at Baltimore’s
pregnancy centers strongly suggests that the need for
regulation of those centers is not as pressing as the City
asserts.
While I certainly agree with the intentions of the law, the city didn't put together a good law. Had they sought to specifically prohibit the explicit or implicit misleading of patients or had the requirement been that establishments that dispense medical advice without a doctor present put up signs to the effect of "The staff of this clinic does not include licensed physicians and patients are advised to consult with a licensed physician before beginning suggested treatments" (such a law would apply to crisis pregnancy center, homeopathy clinics, "cleansing" services, even certain branches of planned parenthood), the outcome might have been different. But they did not. They made a law that blatantly sought to restrict the speech of one particular group, under the shoddy legal theory that any "commercially valuable" services were automatically commercial speech and without any hard evidence to back up their claims of compelling interest. Unless the Supreme Court rules otherwise, I'm forced to side with the court here.
3) That Young Turks report is on par with Right Wingers who blather that the ACLU argued NAMBLA could legally molest children or that the Supreme Court just legalized death panels. If it's not OK when the other guys do it, it is not OK when we do it.
Question: Would we prefer the appeals court rule that the city doesn't have to present hard evidence when banning or restricting certain forms of speech? Or that narrowly tailored precedent can be reinterpreted and expanded by anyone less than the nine supremes?