Supreme Court to consider religious monuments case
during 2008-09 term

WASHINGTON — It is the Ten Commandments versus the Seven Aphorisms, and it will be coming to the Supreme Court sometime in its 2008-09 term.

The justices agreed March 31 to hear a case involving a 47-year-old monument to the Decalogue in a Utah city park. The justices will consider whether its presence in the park as the gift of a private organization gives a local sect — itself younger than the Judeo-Christian monument — the right to erect a tribute to its own religious code.

In Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, the Court will reconsider a lower court’s decision. A panel of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the sect, called Summum, has as much right to erect a monument in the park as the Fraternal Order of Eagles did in the 1960s, when it donated the Decalogue monument.

Leaders of the sect asked the city to display the monument to its “Seven Aphorisms of Summum,” which the 32-year-old group says were also handed to Moses on Mount Sinai along with the Decalogue. Pleasant Grove officials had earlier adopted a procedure for private groups wishing to donate a monument or statue to the park.

City officials refused the group’s request. Summum’s leaders sued, and a federal district court ruled in the city’s favor. But a three-judge panel of the appeals court reversed the lower court’s decision, saying it was discriminatory to allow the Fraternal Order of Eagles monument but to deny Summum the same privilege.

City officials appealed for a re-hearing, but the full 10th Circuit deadlocked on the question, meaning the three-judge panel’s decision stood.

The city, with the help of the American Center for Law and Justice, appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, arguing that forcing Pleasant Grove to allow the monument meant other government entities would also have to allow all sorts of monuments on public land.

“Effectively, a city cannot accept a monument posthumously honoring a war hero without also being prepared to accept a monument that lampoons that same hero. Nor may a city accept a display that positively portrays Native American culture unless it is prepared to accept another that disparages that culture,” said attorneys for the city, in their brief asking the high court to review the 10th Circuit’s decision.

Unlike many other cases regarding such monuments, however, this one does not turn on the First Amendment’s bans on government endorsement or suppression of religion. Instead, it is a free-speech question that animates the case.

Pleasant Grove officials contend in their brief for the case that the city has the right to discriminate between monuments. The Decalogue statue and other monuments in the park, they reason, have become government speech — even though they were donated by private entities.

But other 10th Circuit judges and attorneys for Summum said that argument is off base because the city originally considered the monuments private speech and treated them as such. Therefore, they said, the appeals panel ruled against the city on the basis of the facts of the case and its own policy allowing other private groups to erect monuments.

Pleasant Grove City v. Summum (No. 07-665) will be heard by the court after it begins its 2008-09 term in October.

— ABP