Supreme Court gets one right, and surprisingly perhaps, unanimously.

First, some background:

Pioneer Park (or Park) is a 2.5 acre public park located in the Historic District of Pleasant Grove City (or City) in Utah. The Park currently contains 15 permanent displays, at least 11 of which were donated by private groups or individuals. These include an historic granary, a wishing well, the City’s first fire station, a September 11 monument, and a Ten Commandments monument donated by the Fraternal Order of Eagles in 1971.

Enter into this bucolic, small town setting the adherents of the religion Summum. Generally speaking, I am the last one to engage in ridiculing a religion, as I am an advocate of free and open prayer of whoever you want. I diverge from that slightly in this instance, an explanation as to why will come later. According to the Summum,

In 1975, Amen Ra (Founder), an administrative manager for a large Salt Lake City supply company, began to receive a series of “visits” from advanced living beings. His first reactions of shock and disbelief lead him to a period of seclusion.

Yet the visits continued. The beauty and purity of the concepts that these individuals brought to him were changing his life dramatically. He was instructed to write a book in order to make this information available to those who are ready to hear it. The book was written, and the teachings are now available through the publication.

Whether it is little green men visiting an Admin Manager in SLC, or Xenu, Leader of the “Galactic Confederacy” who, 75 million years ago, brought billions of his people to Terra Firma in DC-8 like spacecraft, stacked them around volcanoes and killed them using H-bombs, I draw the line of acceptable religions right about where UFO’s begin. It always makes me think of Peter Venkman talking to Elaine in Ghostbusters:

Elaine: According to my source, the end of the world will be on February 14th, in the year two thousand and sixteen.
Peter: Valentine’s day. Bummer. Where’d you get your date, Elaine?
Elaine: I recieved this information from an alien. I was sitting at the bar, alone and this alien approached me. He started talking to me, he bought me a drink. And then he must have used some kind of a ray or a mind control device because he forced me to follow him to his room and that’s where he told me about the end of the world.
Peter: So your alien had a room at the Holiday Inn, Paramis?
Elaine: It could have been a room on the spaceship made to look like the hotel. I can’t be sure about that, Peter.

Anyway, back to the Supreme Court.

The Summums wanted to erect in this park a stone monument engraved with the “Seven Aphorisms of SUMMUM” which they allege come from the original Commandments, the later 10 Commandments being some plot by Moses who felt people were unready for the actual Seven. A 10 Commandments plaque was accepted by the city for inclusion in the park, but the Summum one was not. So they sued.

I won’t get into the case too much since no one probably cares about this case too much, but I did want to put some of the decision in here, and then explain why the case is important. From the opinion, at page 17:

If government entities must maintain viewpoint neutrality in their selection of donated monuments, they must either “brace themselves for an influx of clutter” or face the pressure to remove longstanding and cherished monuments. See 499 F. 3d, at 1175 (McConnell, J., dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc). Every jurisdiction that has accepted a donated war memorial may be asked to provide equal treatment for a donated monument questioning the cause for which the veterans fought. New York City, having accepted a donated statue of one heroic dog (Balto, the sled dog who brought medicine to Nome, Alaska, during a diphtheria epidemic) may be pressed to accept monuments for other dogs who are claimed to be equally worthy of commemoration. The obvious truth of the matter is that if public parks were considered to be traditional public forums for the purpose of erecting privately donated monuments, most parks would have little choice but to refuse all such donations. And where the application of forum analysis would lead almost inexorably to closing of the forum, it is obvious that forum analysis is out of place.

What this means essentially is that *IF* the 10th Circuit Opinion had held, any park or memorial land like this would have been forced to accept any memorial donation that was offered. So, if a park was dedicated towards the erection of monuments honoring our service in OEF/OIF, and the VFW put up one, and The American Legion another, the government would have no recourse to one donated by the Westboro Baptist Church which was an obelisk which said that the “Soldiers were killed by God because he hates the Faggots who serve.”

Now, is there anyone out there who would think that this was an appropriate message? I am all for the free passage of ideas, the free exercise of religion, and allowing the marketplace of ideas to handle it, but all that would have resulted from implementation of the 10th Circuit Opinion would have been the removal of all such Memorials by a government who was saddled with an attempt by groups like WBC and the Summum to include their messages.

So, tell me where I am wrong.

Category: Politics