Constitutional Law

Justices Air Plenty Of Scenarios In Dispute Over Religious Display In Utah Park

Legal Times Supreme Court correspondent Tony Mauro reported that yesterday’s oral argument in a case pitting a little-known religious sect against a Utah town over displays in a town park appeared to presage a victory for the government. Mauro wrote that the high court “seemed likely to give its blessing to a Utah town that rejected a small religious sect’s request to install a monument on public park land, even though the town accepted a Ten Commandments display in the same park 32 years earlier.”

According to Mauro most of the justices appeared unwilling to accept the idea that Pleasant Grove City officials must allow displays of other religious expressions in the town park after allowing a large granite monument of the Ten Commandments to be planted there. The New York Times’ Adam Liptak also wrote that all the hypothetical questions proffered by the justices during oral argument did not amount to a “good sign for Summum, a small church that wants to place a monument to the Seven Aphorisms of its faith near a Ten Commandments monument” in the Pleasant Grove City park.

Jay Sekulow, top attorney at TV preacher Pat Robertson’s American Center for Law and Justice, arguing on behalf of Pleasant Grove City claimed all displays in the park were so-called government speech. “When the government is speaking, it is free from the traditional free speech constraints of the First Amendment,” argued Sekulow. Mauro and Liptak noted that Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., took slight umbrage to that approach, saying, “It seems to me that you’re walking into a trap under the establishment clause. If it’s government speech, it may not present a free-speech problem, but what is the government doing speaking, supporting the Ten Commandments?” Roberts was alluding to the fact that the First Amendment bars government from advancing or promoting one religion over another or religion over non-religion. Promoting religious beliefs is typically left to churches, mosques, synagogues and groups, like Summum, not government entities.

Transcript of yesterday’s argument in Pleasant Grove City, Utah v. Summum is available here.

Earlier this week in a guest blog post for ACS, Ayesha N. Khan, legal director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, analyzed the case and concluded that deciding it on free speech grounds could create troubling consequences for both the free-speech and establishment clauses of the First Amendment.

Full post as published by ACS Blog on November 13, 2008 (boomark / email).