Cafe de Mello

Yesterday the US Supreme Court heard an amusing case pitting the right of free speech against ingrained religious belief. The case springs from a dispute in Pleasant Grove, a suburb of Salt Lake City, where a public park contains a monument to the ten commandments.

The followers of Summum (a religion which teaches that Moses first came down from Mount Sinai with tables inscribed with seven aphorisms rather than ten commandments) want to place a monument with their seven aphorisms near the existing monument. To those of us not overly invested in the ten commandments, that may not sound like an unreasonable request, but the city of Pleasant Grove has refused, saying that it has a "policy" of "accepting display donations only if the display either directly relates to the city's history or the donor has longstanding ties to the community."

Of course, no one buys the "city policy" argument for a moment. It isn't like the existing monument is a statue of Col. Beauregard Tiddledong slaughtering hapless Indians as he secures the settlement of Pleasant Grove. This is monument to the ten commandments, and Pleasant Grove is nowhere near Mount Sinai. The monument's donors, the Fraternal Order of the Eagles, could have saved the city considerable legal expense had they put up a monument to "Hotel California" instead.

It is noteworthy that Summum did not sue under the First Amendment's establishment clause, which forbids the government from favoring one religious message over another. That would be a good argument for moving the ten commandment monument to the middle of some private pasture for the edification of the cows and installing the aforementioned statue of Col. Tiddledong in the park. The Summum could also then erect their monument on whatever private property that would have it.

The Supreme Court's final decision will probably rest on the narrow question of whether by accepting the ten commandment monument the City of Pleasant Grove has created a public forum which must be open to all speech, and there is good president for that argument. And the weight of the establishment clause lurks just below this surface. If the city expresses a preference for the message of the ten commandment monument, they have stepped across the threshold into what is easily seen as establishing the preference for one religion over another.

Some have tried to contend that a preference for the ten commandments is secular in that the commandments are important underpinnings to the rule of law in this country. Commandment 1 (according to the New King James Version) "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before Me." pretty much knocks that argument into a cocked hat. You just can't get anymore religious than that.

The ten commandment defenders tend to counter that the religious base of the ten commandments is not a problem because the United States was founded as a Christian Nation. Thomas Jefferson, among others, would disagree.

Although Jefferson's views of Christianity may have shifted somewhat from time to time, most scholars agree that he (like many of the other founding fathers) was a deist. That is, he believed a god existed, but did not follow any particular religion. In a letter to Francis Hopkinson, Jefferson noted:

I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent.

Jefferson also notes, in his description of the development of the Virginia Act for Religious Freedom, that an attempt to reference Jesus Christ as the "author of our religion" was rejected to ensure that "the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination" were covered under the mantel of the law's protection.

There is, therefore, no historical justification for favoring the monument to the ten commandments' fairytale over the summum version, and that to comply with the Constitution, the city either must accept summum's monument or remove the ten commandments.

To keep the peace, I would suggest that Pleasant Grove accept both monuments and erect between them a third monument, this one to the Bill Rights. In fact, the United States would be better served if those organizations intent on littering our schoolrooms, courtrooms and parks with memorials to the ten commandments would instead concentrate their efforts on dispersing framed copies of the constitution and erecting monuments to the bill of rights.