Boise officials: Ten Commandments monument will stay put despite ruling

Governments that receive donations of Ten Commandments displays and other monuments for public parks are not compelled to take everything they are offered, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.

Boise’s Keep the Commandments Coalition was hoping the case would clear the way for the group to seek the return of a Ten Commandments monument to Julia Davis Park, but city officials say the monument will stay where it is, at St. Michael's Cathedral in Boise.

The court said that a small religious group, the Summum, cannot force Pleasant Grove City, Utah, to place its granite marker in a park that has been home to a Ten Commandments monument for 38 years.

City officials do not violate free speech rights when they reject requests to display monuments, Justice Samuel Alito said in his opinion for the court.

“It is hard to imagine how a public park could be opened up for the installation of permanent monuments by every person or group wishing to engage in that form of expression,” Alito said.

The court reversed a ruling of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver that the city’s decision violated the Summum’s rights. The Salt Lake City-based group argued that a city can’t allow some private donations of displays in its public park and reject others.

Boise’s 40-year-old Ten Commandments monument was removed from Julia Davis Park in 2004 to avoid a legal battle with a controversial minister from Kansas seeking to put an anti-gay monument in the park. It is now at St. Michael’s Cathedral in Boise.

The Keep the Commandments Coalition filed legal requests to halt the move and later gathered more than 18,000 signatures in support of an initiative to return the monument.

“Over 52 percent of Boise residents voted to keep the monument where it is (at St. Michael’s). The people of Boise have spoken and this issue has been resolved,” city spokesman Adam Park said Wednesday.

Alito distinguished the Summum’s case from efforts to prevent people from speaking in public parks, which ordinarily would violate the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee.

Alito said “the display of a permanent monument in a public park” requires a different analysis.

Because monuments in public parks help define a city’s identity, “cities and other jurisdictions take some care in accepting donated monuments,” he said.

Brian Barnard, the Summum’s lawyer in Salt Lake City, said in a statement the group would continue to press its case against Pleasant Grove City by arguing that governments can’t favor one religion over another.

“The emphasis in the case will shift to the Establishment Clause which prohibits government favoring one religion over another,” Barnard said. “That is what Pleasant Grove has done. The City has adopted as their own the religious tenets of the Ten Commandments and given those precepts a prominent display in their public park.”

A call to Summum in Salt Lake was referred to Barnard, who did not argue in front of the court but was at the arguments.

“It does not take a constitutional scholar to understand simple fairness,” Barnard said. “The dangers inherent in government favoring one religion are obvious.”

But Justice Antonin Scalia, in a separate opinion that was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, said the Utah case was much like the Ten Commandments display on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol in Austin that the court upheld in 2005.

“There are very good reasons to be confident that the park displays do not violate any part of the First Amendment,” Scalia said. “The city can safely exhale.”

The case is Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, 07-665.

Statesman reporter Chad Dryden also contributed to this report.