In Spence v. Washington, 418 U.S. 405 (1974), the United States Supreme Court held that a state law criminalizing the exhibition of the national flag with any extraneous material attached to it violated the defendant's First Amendment right to symbolically communicate his message through such a practice. Id. at 406. In analyzing the issue under the O'Brien test (United States v. O'Brien), the Court assumed without deciding that the state had valid interests "in preserving the national flag as an unalloyed symbol of our country" and "preventing the appropriation of a revered national symbol by an individual . . . where there was a risk that association of the symbol with a particular product or viewpoint might be taken erroneously as evidence of governmental endorsement." Id. at 412-13. The Court nevertheless held that this interest did not justify the defendant's conviction because "there was no risk that the defendant's acts would mislead viewers into assuming that the Government endorsed his viewpoint." Id. at 414. In other words, the defendant was free to appropriate a revered national symbol for his own communicative purposes so long as he did not thereby purport to speak for the state. I similarly conclude here that an individual is free to appropriate the terminology of marriage, a revered social and legal institution, for his own religious purposes if he does not thereby purport to have actually acquired the legal status of marriage.