Political signs with profanity are considered protected speech, according to a First Amendment expert.
An ABC15 viewer reached out to ask why signs with the words, “F**k your prayers,” were allowed.
“Kids are seeing this and it’s not appropriate,” he said.
Political signs – even those with profanity – have the highest First Amendment protection, according to an expert at Arizona State University.
“And the court has said ... this is core political speech when you're talking about elections and who somebody should vote for,” said Gregg Leslie, the executive director of ASU’s First Amendment Clinic.
The bottom of the sign says it is paid for by the campaign of Gallego’s Republican opponent for Senate, Kari Lake.
The sign quotes in part a post Gallego made after the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting in 2022. He responded to a California congressman who posted, “Our thoughts and prayers are with these families.” In his tweet, Gallego also said prayers “haven’t worked for the last 20 mass shootings” and called for “passing laws that will stop these killings.”
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ABC15 spotted one of these signs at 99th Avenue and Camelback Road in west Phoenix, along with another saying, “I will kill those motherf**kers” with “(protestors)” printed underneath the quote.
The sign appears to reference a 2022 podcast when Gallego talked about Jan. 6 and how the Marine veteran showed his fellow members of Congress how to protect themselves.
“Like, I would have killed all those [expletive] to save this democracy,” he said. “[Expletive] those guys.”
In a statement, Lake’s campaign told ABC15 in part: “We agree that Ruben Gallego's ‘F*** your prayers’ tweet is incredibly offensive, but everything that Ruben does is offensive.”
Gallego’s campaign did not return a request for comment.
So why are such signs legal?
Leslie told ABC15 that political signs are protected speech, which limits cities’ ability to regulate them.
“Profanity would be very hard to regulate,” he said. “Obscenity would be very easy to regulate, and so defining the difference between those two is important.”
But these signs, he added, “Would not ever be judged obscene.”
The City of Phoenix told ABC15 that it doesn’t regulate the content of political signs. State law also limits when the city can take down signs.
“State law allows the City to remove political signs from the right-of-way only when the signs fail to meet certain requirements regarding safety, square footage, and the inclusion of required contact information,” city spokesperson Teleia Galaviz said in a statement.
To regulate signs, cities and towns need to meet the “strict scrutiny test, which means there has to be a compelling governmental interest to regulate this, and the solution has to be as narrowly tailored as possible,” Leslie said.
And a ban on vulgar language on political signs would be too broad and wouldn’t meet that test, he said.
“There's a reason for the First Amendment,” he said. “It's not just this abstract concept of freedom. It's that you have to be free to talk if you're going to have an effective democracy.”
