The US Supreme Court declined on Monday to take up a potentially important First Amendment case that would have examined whether a Colorado appeals court ignored fundamental free-speech protections when it upheld a court order blocking antiabortion protesters from waving poster-sized photos of aborted fetuses at members of a church engaged in an Easter procession.

The case sought to test the scope of a demonstrators right to use gruesome images as part of an attempt to deliver an effective message in a protest on a public street.

The targeted church, St. Johns in the Wilderness Episcopal Church in Denver, sued the protesters, arguing that the demonstration disrupted the religious procession and subjected young children to graphic and disturbing images during what was meant to be an inspiring display of religious devotion.

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The injunction was issued after the church sued the protesters for creating a public nuisance and disrupting its services.

Lawyers for the protesters attacked the court order as an impermissible content-based restriction on free speech in a public area. They said it runs counter to a long line of Supreme Court precedents upholding a right to present obnoxious and offensive speech in public places.

The restriction targets content that the petitioners see as critical to their underlying message, wrote UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh in his brief urging the court to take up the appeal.

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Petitioners believe that the way to portray what they see as the brutality and inhumanity of abortion and the personhood of the fetus is to show exactly what the abortion produces, he wrote. Words, especially words on a sign glimpsed by a passerby, cannot effectively capture that. A photograph can.

The brief said that explicit photos of the victims of lynchings helped advance the cause of the civil rights movement in the United States and that photographs of Holocaust victims helped fully expose the evil of Nazism.

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Can protesters wave gruesome signs? Supreme Court declines free speech case