Court rules for Utah city in religious marker case

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Wednesday that a Utah city that has long permitted a Ten Commandments monument in its city park need not accept the Summum church's Seven Aphorisms monument.

The justices reversed a lower court decision that said once Pleasant Grove had allowed the Ten Commandments marker and several historical artifacts in its Pioneer Park, it had created a "public forum" where other groups' markers and messages must be permitted.

Supreme Court justices said that such rationale does not apply in a dispute over permanent monuments.

The case had been closely watched by numerous cities and municipal groups. Some, such as New York City, had warned that the lower court decision could result in cluttered monument grounds.

Writing for the court, Justice Samuel Alito said placement of a permanent marker on public grounds represents a type of government speech. That gives a city the latitude to say essentially what it wants, rather than open the grounds to all comers.

Alito noted that the lower court had regarded the small Pleasant Grove park as an open forum. "We conclude, however, that although a park is a traditional public forum for speeches and other transitory expressive acts, the display of a permanent monument in a public park is not" such a public forum.

One legal organization that had submitted arguments in the case applauded the court decision in a statement released this afternoon.

Although the case was brought by a religious group, it was a test of the First Amendment's free speech guarantee and did not involve a challenge to the Constitution's requisite separation of church and state. The court has long struggled with those rules for public display of religious artifacts and generally allowed long-established Ten Commandments markers to remain on municipal grounds.

Today's decision was unanimous, but some justices wrote separately to expand on the free-speech analysis and to raise questions about how church-state principles may or may not lurk in a subsequent challenge to Pleasant Grove's monument grounds.