A group of Wheaton students would often get together on Friday nights in downtown Chicago to evangelize. One of their favorite venues was Millennium Park where they would hand out simple threefold pamphlets telling people about faith in Jesus Christ.
When The park’s security team saw what was happening they stopped them. After the fifth case of harassment the students went to see a lawyer.
They connected with a religious freedom law firm called Mauck & Baker.
The legal pushback caused the city to change its park rules. But the revision was an absurd new policy, to divide the park into 11 imaginary rooms. And only one of those “rooms” allowed open conversations about faith.
So the students sued.
Now, months later U.S. District Judge John Blakey decided that while the park may want “protect [its] aesthetic integrity … the city’s restrictions prohibit reasonable forms of expression in large areas of the park.” The students, he agreed, had a First Amendment right to evangelize and hand out Christian material—and then ticked off several reasons why.
Blakey also took a shot at the city’s internal intolerance, pointing out that the executive director of the Millennium Park Foundation conceded that ‘almost no one lodged complaints about their inability to enjoy the art’ in the Park, even before the current Park restrictions became effective.