The odd reasoning of social progressives...

An adult entertainment store wants $500,000 from the city of Montgomery for being wrongly denied a business license, a sum that public officials plan to scrutinize before deciding whether to pay.

X-Mart Adult Supercenter at 3500 Birmingham Highway is seeking what it estimates is revenue it lost between September 2004 and July 2005 after being closed by the city.

Montgomery City Council members initially closed the store for operating without a business license, then kept it closed by denying its license application. X-Mart challenged the denial in federal court, which ruled this summer in its favor on free speech grounds.

(Montgomery Advertiser (emphasis added))

The American Judiciary generally gets all craaazy when it comes to supporting the social left and actively discriminating against social conservatives, even if it has to undermine all Law and text to do so. One problem with the milieu thus created is that many conservatives in the Judiciary are reactionary muddled moderates who will let a Leftist judge pull something out of their own penumbra and then treat that as a precedent to be conserved.

It's curious the way the precedents worked for and set by Leftists work out in various cases like this, until a pornographer has more Constitutional rights than a decent business man trying to support a candidate with political speech. On the one hand progressives are all about government regulation, always supposedly implemented to keep us all safe, yet when it comes to the abortion and pornography industries the Left works to establish precedents under which there can be no regulation. So while a local government can take your house if they decide to (as long as they mumble about social improvement) others enjoy special protections from the State. The reasoning by which Leftists judges work is the material of satire, perhaps if someone pretended that their house was symbolic of their life and they were speaking with it then the State could not regulate it? E.g., "My house is a work of art...it's sayin' somethin', I say! Free speech!"

If the X-Mart Adult Supercenter is engaging in speech, what is it that they're saying? Did the judges look at their merchandise to see what it says?

Perhaps Walmart is engaging in "speech" too, so perhaps they can avoid negative community reactions to their Supercenters and the regulations that come with that by running to the textual degenerates of the American Judiciary? Probably not, if they add a porn section or an abortion department or do something that would give them all the special rights given to religious hedonists then maybe the Judiciary would protect them.