High court protects Ten Commandment sites

WASHINGTON, Feb. 25 (UPI) -- The U.S. Supreme Court took a big step Wednesday to protect Ten Commandments monuments on hundreds of county courthouse lawns and other public land.

In a unanimous judgment, the justices ruled in a case out of Utah that governments don't have to allow competing monuments on public land simply because a private message is contained in a monument already on the public land.

Justice Samuel Alito, in the main opinion, drew a line between "government speech" -- choosing which privately donated monuments to display on public land -- and "private speech" in a public forum. The First Amendment protects the latter but doesn't restrict the former, he said.

The case comes out of Pleasant Grove City, Utah. The city's Pioneer Park has several "unattended" displays, including a Ten Commandment monument donated by the Eagles, a fraternal organization.

However, when a tiny religious group called Summum, founded in 1975 and based in Salt Lake City, wanted to install its own Seven Principles of Creation monument, the city rejected the application.

A U.S. appeals court in Denver ruled that if the city accepts one monument, it had to accept the other. But the Supreme Court reversed.

Citing a number of examples -- including the late John Lennon's gift of an "Imagine" monument to New York's Central Park and the Statue of Liberty -- Alito said there is only so much public land available and government must be able to pick and choose.

Otherwise, "when France presented the Statue of Liberty to the United States in 1884, this country had the option of either (a) declining France's offer or (b) accepting the gift but providing a comparable location in the harbor of New York for other statues of a similar size and nature (e.g., a Statue of Autocracy, if one had been offered by, say, the German Empire or Imperial Russia)."

Seven other justices signed on to Alito's opinion but all nine agreed with the judgment either in Alito's opinion or in four concurrent opinions.

(No. 07-665, Pleasant Grove City vs. Summum.)