Pleasant Grove case gains supporters

Pleasant Grove has some big friends helping it try to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to allow it to bar a church from placing a monument in a city park, even if other monuments with religious themes are already there.

Among those filing friend-of-the-court briefs supporting Pleasant Grove are: the U.S. government; 14 states; 10 cities, including New York City; the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars; and religious groups including the Jewish Social Policy Action Network and the American Catholic Lawyers Association.

Meanwhile, the church opposing Pleasant Grove in the case, Summum, has had only two groups file friend-of-the-court briefs for it, the American Jewish Congress and the Rutherford Institute, a civil liberties group.

Several others groups have filed briefs that are neither for nor against Pleasant Grove or Summum but prefer alternate outcomes or worry the court could hurt their interests if its ruling is too wide. They range from the Boy Scouts of America to Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

It all helps make the case one of the most colorful on the Supreme Court's docket this year. All those briefs have been filed in advance of oral arguments, which are scheduled for Nov. 12.

Pleasant Grove had allowed numerous groups to donate monuments, memorials and pioneer relics for display in its Pioneer Park — including a Ten Commandments monument. But it denied Summum's attempted donation of a monument to the church's "Seven Aphorisms," which it believes were given to Moses in a separate set of tablets.

A federal appeals court said that violated Summum's free-speech rights, and Pleasant Grove is asking the Supreme Court to reverse that.

The U.S. Solicitor General filed a brief saying the case could destroy the ability of the National Park Service or federal museums to control what monuments and items they accept and display — and noted that donations have included everything from the Statue of Liberty to monuments at battlefields and Smithsonian museum artifacts.

The solicitor general argued that under the appeals court decision, "a city's display of a privately donated monument to Abraham Lincoln could entitle an individual to insist that the city permit the erection of a monument to Jefferson Davis, or a group could insist that the presence of the memorial in Pioneer Park commemorating the Sept. 11 attacks entitles it to erect a memorial to the terrorists who carried them out."

The solicitor general said, as Pleasant Grove contends, that a government's decision on what to accept and display amounts to "government speech," which is just as protected as private freedom of speech.