Judge Noonan nails it

Here's Judge John Noonan, writing a few months ago in the Canyon Ferry Road Baptist Church case:

An unregulated, unregistered press is important to our democracy. So are unregulated unregistered churches. Churches have played an important — no, an essential — part in the democratic life of the United States. . . . In a secular age, Freedom of Speech is more talismanic than Freedom of Religion. But the latter is the first freedom in our Bill of Rights.