HOUSTON (Legal Newsline) – A Texas church and a coffee shop are suing Attorney General Ken Paxton over legislation that requires them to post signs asking visitors to keep guns off of their property.
The lawsuit filed Sept. 2 in Houston federal court names other Texas officials and says the free speech rights of Bay Area Unitarian Universalist Church and Antidote Coffee have been violated.
“Specifically Texas property owners who espouse this viewpoint must post multiple large, text-heavy signs containing language specified by the State in order to exercise the longest established and most fundamental of their property rights: the right to exclude,” the suit says.
“If these property owners use other means of indicating that firearms are not welcome on the premises—even if entirely reasonable and understandable—they cannot avail themselves of Texas’s criminal trespass laws.”
The law discourages property owners from erecting large signs with heightened speech requirements, the suit says.
“These signage requirements effectively prevent property owners from communicating a ‘no guns’ message on their own terms and interfere with property owners’ efforts to relay other, non-gun-related messages as well,” the suit says.