The incident began when four members of Wheaton College’s Chicago Evangelism Team, a group of students devoted to spreading the gospel in the city, were stopped from handing out religious literature to people in Millennium Park by security guards.
The students stopped passing out the literature, but one began preaching verbally, only to be told they were violating a city ordinance. The four students sued the city in September 2019 after city officials rebuffed their request to change the park rules to allow their efforts. U.S. District Court Judge Robert Blakey ruled in February 2020 that the plaintiffs’ argument that the city’s rules for Millennium Park violated the First Amendment by banning speeches and the distribution of literature in the vast majority of the park was likely to prevail at trial. Blakey also blocked the city from enforcing the rules as the case proceeded through the court system.after the lawsuit, and did so again in September.
However, literature may not be distributed in the Lurie Garden, the Boeing Galleries or on the plaza surrounding the Cloud Gate sculpture, better known as the Bean, according to the rules. The only restrictions on speech involve sound amplified to be heard more than 100 feet away from the speaker, or speech that is designed to disrupt a planned and permitted event in the park, according to the rules.
Hey WTTW, did anything more interesting (and actually relevant to Chicagoans) recently happen in Millennium Park that you might want to cover? Come on now