The U.S. Supreme Court has struck down an Arizona law that forced churches to display their signs at night while other signs were allowed to be continually displayed.

The Good News Community Church of Gilbert, Arizona had filed suit in 2008 over a city ordinance that prohibited signs pointing out directions to an event from being erected more than 12 hours before an event and more than one hour after the scheduled beginning of the event.

The city kept telling the church they put up too many signs and that they left them displayed for too long.

The church said that the law was unfairly being applied to churches.  Political signs were not given the same restrictions for being displayed at short times.  For signs that are not non-ideological there are no restrictions on the time for display.

The Supreme Court in a unanimous decision ruled the city was discriminatory in the law and thus declared it unconstitutional.

“[A]n innocuous justification cannot transform a facially content-based law into one that is content neutral,” the justices wrote. “Innocent motives do not eliminate the danger of censorship presented by a facially content-based statute, as future government officials may one day wield such statutes to suppress disfavored speech.”

“That is why the First Amendment expressly targets the operation of the laws—i.e., the ‘abridg[ement] of speech’—rather than merely the motives of those who enacted them,” the ruling continued.

The Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented the church, hailed the Court’s decision.

“The Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling is a victory for everyone’s freedom of speech,” said ADF Senior Counsel David Cortman in a statement. “Speech discrimination is wrong regardless of whether the government intended to violate the First Amendment or not, and it doesn’t matter if the government thinks its discrimination was well-intended. It’s still [the] government playing favorites, and that’s unconstitutional.”