LAS VEGAS — 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!" Griner 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 an awkward one.
The preachers openly despise the ACLU, which they view as an insufferably liberal institution, albeit one that had lately seemed like their only friend in town.
The ACLU doesn't think much of the preachers' condemnations of, well, a lot of people, including "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 exactly fit with the anything-goes marketing scheme that has served this city well.
But the ACLU forged ahead because, the organization said, a long-percolating dispute between the casinos and the preachers threatened the sanctity of the quintessential American venue for free expression: the sidewalk.
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. It was a fight that had been taken up, at one time or another, by a motley collection of people who want to express their opinion in public, including advocates for the homeless, animal rights activists, war protesters and hawkers for erotic dance clubs.
"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."
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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, it's not that simple here.
In 1993, the city was forced to widen portions of Las Vegas Boulevard, including the two-mile stretch known as the Strip that runs along the themed casinos, to accommodate soaring traffic, new resorts and growing tourism. As a result, new sidewalks had to be built on private property in front of large and powerful casinos. Increasingly, the casinos attempted to control the activity on the sidewalks.
The following year, after 500 labor protesters were arrested for trespassing because the MGM Grand complained, civil libertarians launched their fight. It led, eventually, to a lawsuit against the casinos, and in 2001 a federal appellate court sided with a different group of labor union protesters, ruling that the sidewalk in front of the Venetian resort was a public forum 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 firms and some police officers weren't aware of the ruling -- or were choosing to ignore it. Casino security repeatedly told the preachers that 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 even 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, Nevada ACLU's general counsel, became a free-speech SWAT team, descending on the Strip on a moment's notice to make impassioned, impromptu arguments that the preachers could stay -- confrontations that drew crowds of curious tourists.
Earlier this year, security guards at New York-New York, a resort with a miniature facsimile of Manhattan's skyline, evicted an Iraq war protester. Such incidents -- and the ACLU's argument that Las Vegas was sacrificing constitutional rights to guard its carefree image -- caught city leaders' attention.
Alan Feldman, a senior vice president of MGM Mirage, which owns the MGM Grand and New York-New York, conceded that the casino had erred.
