As noted nearly 18 months ago, the US Marines at Camp Lejeune directed 25-year Marine veteran Jesse Nieto to remove stickers from the back of his car that they deemed offensive.  Nieto sued, and a federal judge has now ruled that the base violated Nieto’s rights.

The stickers were described as “anti-Islam;” Nieto put the stickers on his car not long after his son, a Navy Sailor, was killed on the USS Cole when it was bombed in 2000.

Interestingly, it appears the judge did not rule the policy that Camp Lejeune used was inherently bad; instead, he seemed to say it was the unbalanced application of the policy that essentially made Lejeune guilty of government viewpoint discrimination:

US District Judge Malcolm J. Howard said in a ruling posted Wednesday that a Lejeune regulation targeting inflammatory speech on base was improperly applied to Nieto’s decals and not to pro-Islamic messages that may be just as incendiary. Howard concluded that the application of the rule violated Nieto’s free speech.

“While military officials are entitled to great deference in restricting speech to further the military’s needs, they may not do so in a manner that discriminates against a particular point of view,” Howard wrote in his decision.

This premise–that the government discriminates when it applies its policies to only one viewpoint–was also the basis of the ruling in California that said a school district discriminated against Christianity.

The Military Times has a picture of Nieto and his vehicle.