The preacher with a hole in the knee of his jeans and a pocketful of prayer cards waded through the late-night crowd--young men with hats on sideways, women in saucy dresses, hired hands passing out fliers for escort services.
Tom Griner turned a raised palm toward Robert Jones, a 21-year-old visiting from Illinois.
"Jesus saves!" he shouted.
"Maybe," said Jones, not stopping to chat. "But he didn't win me $500 last night."
The way the American Civil Liberties Union sees it, the 1st Amendment was made for nights like this. The organization in recent months has turned a small band of street preachers into unlikely symbols of free speech--fighting, sometimes in noisy confrontations with police and casinos, for the preachers' right to spread the Gospel on the Las Vegas Strip.
The alliance is awkward. The preachers openly despise the ACLU, which they view as an insufferably liberal institution. The ACLU doesn't think much of the preachers' condemnations of "fornicators," Democrats, women who seek abortions and people who have not accepted Christ as their savior.
And the Las Vegas establishment doesn't think much of the whole issue; evangelical preachers bellowing about "homos," "porno freaks" and the devil don't fit with the city's anything-goes marketing scheme.
But the ACLU forged ahead because, the organization said, a long-percolating dispute between the casinos and the preachers threatened the quintessential American venue for free expression: the sidewalk.
Tenuous deal reached
This fall, the group's campaign resulted in a tenuous agreement among casinos, police and city leaders that allows the preachers to stay. If the agreement holds, it could mark the end of a decade-long fight to give control over the sidewalks back to the public.
"We know we don't fit into the motif here," Griner said. "But they"--he nodded toward the casinos behind him--"are not the only game in town."
Courts have long held that sidewalks are constitutionally protected forums for public opinion. Generally, as long as people are doing things that are otherwise legal, they can do it on the sidewalk. Vegas being Vegas, however, it's not that simple here.
In 1993 the city was forced to widen portions of Las Vegas Boulevard, including the 2-mile Strip that runs along the themed casinos. New sidewalks had to be built on private property in front of casinos, which increasingly attempted to control activity on the walkways.
The following year, after 500 labor protesters were arrested for trespassing because the MGM Grand complained, civil libertarians launched their fight.
A public forum
Eventually the fight led to a lawsuit against the casinos, and in 2001 a federal appellate court sided with a different group of labor protesters, ruling that the sidewalk in front of the Venetian Casino Resort was a public forum even though it was on private property.
"What the court said, basically, is that if it looks like a sidewalk, smells like a sidewalk and functions like a sidewalk, then by golly it's a public sidewalk," said Gary Peck, executive director of the Nevada ACLU.
Early this year, however, it became clear that casinos, private security companies and some police officers weren't aware of the ruling or were ignoring it. Casino security repeatedly told the preachers they were on private property and needed to leave. Police officers insisted that the preachers move even after the preachers produced copies of the court opinion. Griner was cited with obstruction, a misdemeanor, for blocking the sidewalk.
Griner and fellow preacher Jim Webber began videotaping their encounters with security personnel and police officers. Peck and Allen Lichtenstein, the Nevada ACLU's general counsel, became a free-speech SWAT team, descending on the Strip on a moment's notice to argue passionately that the preachers could stay.
Earlier this year, security guards at New York-New York, a resort that features a miniature facsimile of the Manhattan skyline, evicted an Iraq war protester. Such sidewalk incidents--and the ACLU's argument that Las Vegas was sacrificing constitutional rights to guard its carefree image--caught city leaders' attention.
In recent months, all sides began operating under an agreement that for-profit enterprises would stay away from sidewalks that technically were private property. Advocates, such as preachers or protesters, can stay, with certain restrictions. For example, if preachers carry placards or signs wider than the width of their body, officers may determine that they are blocking pedestrian traffic and ask them to move.