Supreme Court takes Utah case involving religious monument

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court has agreed to consider a free speech case in which a church wants to place a religious monument in a park.

Officials in Pleasant Grove City, Utah, asked the court to step into the lawsuit brought by the religious group known as Summum, saying that if the group prevails, governments would be inundated with demands to display donated monuments.

The dispute stems from Pleasant Grove City's refusal to allow the display of a "Seven Aphorisms of Summum" monument in the same park that is the home for a Ten Commandments monument donated by the Fraternal Order of Eagles 47 years ago.

At issue is whether a donated monument displayed by a municipality remains the private speech of the original donor, or is government speech; and whether placing donated monuments in a government-owned park creates a public forum or whether the government retains authority to select which monuments to display.

The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver ruled that monument remains the private speech of the donor and that the park is a public forum.

"Government bodies are now sitting targets for demands that they grant 'equal access' to whatever comparable monuments a given group wishes to have installed, be it Summum's Seven Aphorisms, an atheist group's Monument to Freethought or Rev. Fred Phelps's denunciations of homosexual persons," lawyers for Pleasant Grove City wrote in asking the Supreme Court to intervene.

In response, the church says government bodies always have the option of banning display of all privately donated monuments. Pleasant Grove City has treated donated items as private speech for decades, said the religious group,

Summum, a Latin term meaning the sum total of all creation, was founded in 1975 and is headquartered in Salt Lake City. The Seven Aphorisms refer to a notion that when Moses received stone tablets on Mount Sinai inscribed with writings made by a divine being, he actually received two separate sets of tablets — the Seven Aphorisms and the Ten Commandments.

The case is Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, 07-665.