Justices to hear Pleasant Grove tablets case: Top court to decide city's monument dispute

PLEASANT GROVE — This small-but-growing Utah Valley city is getting a bit of national notoriety. The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear a free-speech case in which a religious group wants to place a religious monument in a park.

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

Attorneys for Pleasant Grove say they're excited to be able to address the First Amendment issue.

"We're delighted that the Supreme Court has agreed to take this case," Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, a constitutional law firm based in Washington, D.C., that is representing Pleasant Grove, said in a statement to the Deseret Morning News. "This is a critically important First Amendment case that focuses on the well-established distinction between government speech and private speech."

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

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 in favor of Summum, saying the monument remains the private speech of the donor and that the park is a public forum.

Sekulow said that the Supreme Court can change the interpretation of the amendment and the decision by the appeals court.

"We're hopeful the Supreme Court will ultimately conclude that the appeals court got it wrong," he said. "This is an important opportunity for the high court to correct a flawed interpretation of the First Amendment."

In asking the Supreme Court to intervene, lawyers for Pleasant Grove wrote: "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."

In response, Summum said government bodies always have the option of banning display of all privately donated monuments.

Pleasant Grove has treated donated items as private speech for decades, said Summum, a Latin term meaning the sum total of all creation, which was founded in 1975 and is headquartered in Salt Lake City.