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Thou Shalt Not Place Monument

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The Summum religious group, founded in 1975, has at its headquarters a sacred pyramid that you can visit on Thursdays.

A lawsuit tinged with questions of free speech and separation of church and state ended when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the Summum religious group’s attempts to install a marker of its own in a Utah park that already has a Ten Commandments monument. The proposed monument would commemorate the Seven Aphorisms that Summum says Moses destroyed on Mount Sinai.

The New York Times:

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Wednesday that a small religious group cannot force a city in Utah to place a granite marker in a local park that already is home to a Ten Commandments display.

In a case involving the Salt Lake City-based Summum, the court said that governments can decide what to display in a public park without running afoul of the First Amendment.

Pleasant Grove City, Utah, rejected the group’s marker, prompting a federal lawsuit that argued that a city can’t allow some private donations of displays in its public park and reject others. The federal appeals court in Denver agreed.

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TAGS: christianity church church and state free speech monument park religion salt lake city summum utah

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By Chapeau, February 26 at 7:23 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)

I concur Purplewolf !

Humankind must break free of archaic sky-god mythology.

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By purplewolf, February 26 at 2:51 am #

The biggest threat to all of mankind is organized religion(s).

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By JFoster2k, February 25 at 8:11 pm #

Let’s face it, regardless of the noble words and efforts put into the constitutional separation of church and state, the reality is that we Americans live in a Protestant Christian theocratic republic.

These fights will continue for years, decades, centuries or until religion itself is abolished.

This is similar to the case of the Ten Commandments monument placed in a courthouse (in KY?). That case at least had some good back-and-forth… The right claiming that the Ten Commandments were appropriate in a courthouse since they are the basis of our laws. The left pointing out that only 4 of the Ten Commandments are actually laws.

This kind of religious state is dangerous.
I encourage all TD’ers to read “The End of Faith” by Sam Harris.

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By Ed Harges, February 25 at 7:41 pm #

Oh heavens! Do we have an imperfect separation of church and state in America?

That’s nothing compared to America’s total lack of separation of synagogue and state — judging from our government’s bipartisan, fanatical obedience to the interests and dictates of the Holy State of Israel.

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By Margaret Currey, February 25 at 3:50 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)

I think this is the result of Bush II and his faith based ideas, which don’t work.

When I was a child in public school I had to recite the Our Father, etc. and the ending was not like the end that that Catholics said.

That was bad enough now the same public school let the Methodists students go to insturctions on school time while the Catholic students stayed behind and did things like painting drawing, etc. then the other students came back to school for an hour before school was out. I was only young then but I saw the injustices in the practices.

Of course small towns do what they want but now the religious right want to push the envelope and I am sure they assume that every person in the United States is a Christian and likes their ideas.

Time to really use the law that says seperation of state and church.

Even the Native Americans believed in the Great Spirit which I interpert as God.

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