Roberts Supports Ban on Sect Display with 'Statue of Despotism' Hypo
During oral arguments yesterday, several justices fretted about the unusual monuments that would have to be erected if the U.S. Supreme Court ruled for a sect seeking to force a Utah town to display its Seven Aphorisms.
The justices’ comments suggest the court will rule against the Summum religious group, Legal Times reports. At issue is whether the town must honor the Summum monument request under the First Amendment’s free speech clause since a donated Ten Commandments display is in the public park.
A hypothetical by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. illustrated the concerns, according to the New York Times.
“You have a Statue of Liberty,” Roberts said. “Do we have to have a statue of despotism? Or do we have to put any president who wants to be on Mount Rushmore?”
The Summum group challenged the government decision based on the First Amendment’s free speech clause. Past cases have held government cannot discriminate against private speech in a public forum, but government can exclude competing ideas when it is speaking for itself.
The Summum group had not raised a different First Amendment argument: that the Utah town violated the establishment clause, the Legal Times story says. Several briefs filed in the case said such a claim would have been precluded under precedent set by the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The town of Pleasant Grove, Utah, is arguing its decision is government speech entitling it to discriminate among viewpoints.
Roberts raised the establishment clause issue in a question addressed to the lawyer representing Pleasant Grove, Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice.
“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.”
The Supreme Court’s Ten Commandments decisions in 2005 were decided under the establishment clause, the Washington Post reports. The divided court barred the Commandments from being displayed in two Kentucky courthouses but allowed them on the grounds of the Texas Capitol.
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 Washington Post story lists some of them: “Summum is mind,” “Everything vibrates” and, “The measure of the swing to the right is the measure of the swing to the left.”
