Government Speech: Monumental Messages
U.S. Supreme Court: Pleasant Grove City, Utah v. Summum
Hard to evaluate this decision. For now, score one for the like-minded. Five or ten years from now, the score could change dramatically, and so too could the way we look at this decision.
Pioneer Park is in Pleasant Grove City Utah. There are a variety of permanent monuments and displays in the park, just as there are in Central Park, the Boston Commons and Grant Park in Chicago. Cities everywhere put up monuments, either with their money or with privately donated funds. So here’s the question: Once a city puts a monument in its park, must it put up other monuments if they are donated, paid for and inoffensive? And where exactly on the free speech scale do monuments fall?
The short answers are that cities do not have to put up other monuments, and there are no free speech issues involved. Because monuments are a form of “government speech” and therefore, “not subject to scrutiny under the Free Speech Clause” of the Constitution.
Pioneer Park already had 15 permanent displays, 11 of which were donated at no cost to the City. Included among its stone and granite collection was a Ten Commandments monument given to it by the Fraternal Order of Eagles in 1971.
Along comes Summum, a religious organization based in Salt Lake City that dates back to ancient 1975. Its president twice asked Pleasant Grove City permission to erect a stone monument which would contain “the seven Aphorisms of SUMMUM.” According to Summum theology,
the Seven Aphorisms were inscribed on the original tablets handed down by God to Moses on Mount Sinai...Because Moses believed that the Israelites were not ready to receive the Aphorisms, he shared them only with a select group of people [apparently the early progenitors of the Summumites]. In the Summum Exodus account, Moses then destroyed the original tablets, traveled back to Mount Sinai, and returned with a second set of tablets containing the Ten Commandments.
So the Ten Commandments were the next best thing. This isn’t exactly the Biblical account, but then the Summumites have an absolute right to believe whatever they want. They just don’t have an absolute right to say it in stone. And now, for the Summumites, history repeats itself as Pleasant Grove City, like Moses before it, also rejected the Seven Aphorisms. In response, the Summumites sued (which may be an eighth aphorism—someone should look into this) insisting the City must accept and place their monument in the park, particularly since it was going to be Summum simoleons that were footing the bill.
The lower court sided with Pleasant Grove City and affirmed its right to reject the Summum offer. The Court of Appeals reversed and held that if you take one view set in stone, you must take the other. Pleasant Grove appealed and the nation’s high court took a look at the statues.
According to the court, “if petitioners were engaging in their own expressive conduct” when they choose or don’t choose a particular statue, “then the Free Speech Clause has no application. The Free Speech Clause restricts government regulation of private speech; it does not regulate government speech.” And, the court said, “Permanent monuments displayed on public property typically represent government speech.” The high court went on to describe how governments have “long used monuments to speak to the public.” Whether the statue is of George Washington, Robert E. Lee or Pancho Villa, these monuments communicate government messages. They are a “means of expression” and the local or national government has a right to pick and choose which monuments say best what they want to say most.
Maybe it’s time to take a hard look at the monuments that surround us and to listen close to what governments are saying now and what they were saying in the past. It may be a clue to the times we live in and what sort of statues we can expect to see in the future. While we might agree with Pleasant Grove’s decision to forgo the Seven Aphorisms for the Ten Commandments, who knows what our governments will be saying in stone ten years from now under their nearly absolute right to free government speech.
And finally, given the nature of monumental government speech, what exactly are the pigeons trying to tell us?
