Summum Group Loses in Supreme Court on Religious Display of ‘Seven Aphorisms’
A religious group has failed in its initial effort to force a Utah public park to display its Seven Aphorisms.
In a unanimous opinion by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., the U.S. Supreme Court ruled governments do not violate the First Amendment free speech clause by deciding which permanent monuments to display in a public park, the Associated Press reports.
Alito cautioned, however, that the government is not free to violate the establishment clause, an issue that was not before the court, according to SCOTUSblog.
Confining his analysis to the free speech clause, Alito said Pleasant Grove City, Utah, was not required to accept a monument from a private group called Summum for its park just because it had already accepted a Ten Commandments display.
Believers say the Seven Aphorisms are a separate set of creation principles that Moses received but discarded because the people were not ready for them. The third aphorism holds: Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.
Alito said courts should not use forum analysis, used to evaluate requests by private speakers for access to a public forum, to evaluate cases involving permanent monuments in public places.
“The placement of a permanent monument in a public park is best viewed as a form of government speech and is therefore not subject to scrutiny under the free speech clause,” he wrote in the opinion (PDF).
In the case of speakers, even the most long-winded eventually go home. But monuments remain, he wrote. “It is hard to imagine how a public park could be opened up for the installation of permanent monuments by every person or group wishing to engage in that form of expression,” he said.
The Summum group had argued the case under the free speech clause rather than the establishment clause, likely because the latter claim would have been precluded under precedent set by the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. raised the establishment clause issue during oral arguments in a question posed to the lawyer representing Pleasant Grove City. “You’re really just picking your poison, aren’t you?” he said. “The more you say that the monument is government speech” to avoid the free speech clause problem, “the more it seems to me you’re walking into a trap under the establishment clause.”
