That’s Eugene Volokh’s apt assessment of this execrable Sixth Circuit decision from Wednesday in which a divided panel conferred a heckler’s veto on an angry crowd at the 2012 Arab International Festival, which took place on the public streets of Dearborn, Michigan. The crowd responded violently to the proselytizing activities—some of which were, as Volokh puts it, “pretty rude”—of a group of Christian evangelists. As Judge Eric L. Clay sums it up in his dissent:

This is an easy case. Plaintiffs Ruben Israel and the Bible Believers came to the 2012 Arab International Festival (“Festival”) to exercise their sincerely held religious beliefs. Those beliefs compelled Plaintiffs to hurl offensive words and display offensive images at a crowd made up predominantly of children. Defendants themselves admit that these words and images were protected by the Constitution. A video shows Defendant Deputy Chief Dennis Richardson telling Israel that the Bible Believers must leave the Festival under pain of arrest because “what you are saying to them [the crowd], and they are saying back to you is creating danger.” This is a clear heckler’s veto, breaching the principle that “hostile public reaction does not cause the forfeiture of the constitutional protection afforded a speaker’s message so long as the speaker does not go beyond mere persuasion and advocacy of ideas [but rather] attempts to incite to riot.”