The Seven Aphorisms
A court test of the limits on faith's access to the public square

Saturday, November 15, 2008

PIONEER PARK in Pleasant Grove City, Utah, is home to a number of displays. The city's first town hall sits on the property, as does its first millstone and a replica of a 1930s log cabin. Also sharing the space is a Ten Commandments monument donated in 1971 by the Fraternal Order of Eagles. Not to be found on the premises: The "Seven Aphorisms." (Aphorism No. 1: "Summum is mind, thought; the universe is a mental creation.") And therein lies the conflict at the heart of a Supreme Court case argued on Wednesday.

The aphorisms are the guiding principles for the Summum, a small spiritual group founded in 1975 in Salt Lake City that embraces many of the tenets of Gnostic Christianity. Pleasant Grove City declined the Summum's offer of a monument, saying that it neither reflected the city's history nor was being donated by a civic group with roots in the community. The Summum sued, arguing that the city had violated the First Amendment's guarantee of free expression. The group claims that because the city granted a spot in Pioneer Park to the privately donated Ten Commandments monument it cannot deny the same accommodation to the Summum. The logical conclusion: Either the government allows no religious monuments or it must allow all.

Those supporting the city say that this defies law and common sense. The government is not suppressing the Summum's private speech but making legitimate decisions about which permanent structures are appropriate, they say. Public lands would be littered with impertinent, if not offensive, displays if governments' hands were tied.

Three years ago, the court decided -- albeit on different legal grounds -- cases that may be pertinent and could help resolve the Summum case without going to extremes. In one case, the court ruled unconstitutional the decision by local officials in 1999 to post Ten Commandments displays in two Kentucky courthouses. Such a "contemporary state effort to focus attention upon a religious text is certainly likely to prove divisive," the court concluded.

At the same time, it upheld a Ten Commandments display that had been on the grounds of the Texas state capitol for some four decades. Because the display was one of 38 monuments or markers commemorating Texas history, it was properly displayed in a "primarily nonreligious" way, the court concluded.

Pleasant Grove City would have raised suspicions if it had tried to block the Summum from passing out leaflets on public property. But the right literally to speak out in the public square does not mean there is a parallel right to erect a permanent monument on public land.

If the Ten Commandments monument were erected in Pioneer Park today, it probably would trigger criticism and possibly successful litigation. But there it is -- and there it has been for nearly four decades. The Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution does not require that all religiously tinged monuments perched on government property be torn down. It should now conclude that the mere existence of such monuments does not require governments to erect new ones.