NEW YORK (AP) -- A judge has promised a fast decision in a lawsuit brought by Yoko Ono to remove the song "Imagine" from a movie challenging the concept of Darwinian evolution after a lawyer for the film's distributors warned the litigation could wreck the movie's political message.

U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein said he will rule quickly in the case after both sides described the issues surrounding the song and movie in harsh terms during arguments on Monday.

Lawyer Anthony T. Falzone said the movie, "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," was set to open in Canada on June 6 and DVD rights needed to be finalized by the end of May for distribution in October. The movie is currently being shown in about 200 theaters in the United States.

He said an adverse ruling by Stein would mean "you have muzzled the speech of my clients" because they would have to replace the song with other images, losing the chance to make the issue important enough that it could even influence the U.S. presidential campaign.

"If you issue that injunction, you trample on these free speech rights and you put a muzzle on them and you do it in a way that stops them from speaking on this political issue leading up to the election," Falzone said.

Ono has accused the movie's producers of infringing the song's copyrights by using portions of it without her permission, giving the impression that the Lennon family had authorized it.

Dorothy M. Weber, a lawyer for Ono, Sean Lennon, Julian Lennon and EMI Blackwood Music Inc., said the makers of the movie "took away their right to stay no."

She said the defendants -- Premise Media Corp. of Dallas, Rampant Films of Sherman Oaks, California, and Rocky Mountain Pictures Inc. of Salt Lake City -- had obtained authorization for the other songs used in the movie, a point the judge noted himself.

"We are not saying the film should stop being shown," she said. "We are talking about a small segment of the film we are asking be removed because it violates our clients' rights."

The film features Ben Stein, an actor, quiz show host and former speech writer for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, challenging evolution. He suggests life could have originated through intelligent design, a concept favored by some religious conservatives, that holds that the order and complexity of the universe is so great that a supernatural entity must have created it.

About 20 to 30 seconds of the song are played in the movie.

Falzone said the portion of the song -- "nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too" -- was central to the movie.

"What they are criticizing here, your honor, is they're saying that happy, naive feeling you get when you hear the song and think about peace and children and play is dangerous, dangerously naive."

Falzone said the movie suggests "that this absence of religion paves the way for fascism, totalitarianism, Nazism."

"Really, what the film is doing is, it's asking if John Lennon was right and it's concluding he was wrong," the lawyer said.

He said the movie makers did not believe they needed to ask Ono's permission to use a portion of the song because it was not the entire song or enough of it to infringe on the copyright.

"Why would you ask somebody for permission to criticize their work?" he asked. "It's not likely it's going to be granted."

Weber acknowledged that there are instances when portions of songs protected by copyrights can be used without the copyright owner's permission, a legal right known as "fair use."

But, she said, "fair use is not about destroying the other person's market. It's about carving very, very limited exceptions to a copyright proprietor's monopoly."

The judge required EMI Blackwood Music Inc. and the family of John Lennon to post a $20,000 bond by Wednesday, to show they can cover any losses suffered by the film's producers as a result of the lawsuit.

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