In
Curtis, we relied on
Rowan v. United States Post Office Dept., 397 U.S. 728, 90 S.Ct. 1484, 25 L.Ed.2d 736 (1970).
That reliance too is weakened by
Discovery Network's emphasis on reasonable fit.
Rowan involved a federal statute that permitted homeowners to contact the Postmaster General if the homeowner received any mailings that the homeowner considered to be erotic or sexual.
See id. at 730, 90 S.Ct. 1484. The Postmaster would then contact the sender and order that entity to delete the homeowner's name from its mailing list.
See id. The Court upheld the statute, proclaiming that “a mailer's right to communicate must stop at the mailbox of an unreceptive addressee.”
Id. at 736–37, 90 S.Ct. 1484. In Rowan, a homeowner could prevent
any material from entering his home, even a “dry goods catalog,” if the homeowner deemed the material offensive.
Rowan, 397 U.S. at 737, 90 S.Ct. 1484. Here, the homeowner cannot ban any bothersome solicitation but only real estate solicitation. The distinction between real estate solicitation and other kinds of solicitation is a by-product of the statute's original purpose of preventing blockbusting and cannot, we think, satisfy the
Discovery Network requirement of a “ ‘fit’ between [the state's] goals and [the state's] chosen means.”
Discovery Network, 507 U.S. at 428, 113 S.Ct. 1505. Rowan involved no governmental distinction between one kind of offensive material and another—all distinctions were made by the homeowner. Here, the state, not the homeowner, has made the distinction between real estate solicitations and other solicitations without a logical privacy-based reason. We can no longer, after
Discovery Network, place the interest in residential privacy above the interest in logical distinctions in speech restrictions absent some showing that the restriction reasonably fits the justification.