Supreme Court Update


In two days we are expecting the Briefs in Opposition to be filed in our two Supreme Court cases involving the Ten Commandments. A group called Summum is suing to force communities that have displays of the Ten Commandments to include their "Seven Aphorisms." These aphorisms stand in stark contrast to the message of the Ten Commandments and other monuments that the city allows. As I am writing this update, the briefs from Summum are probably at the printers getting ready to be sent to us. Our formal replies will be sent to the Supreme Court by March 1st. These are incredibly important cases. We will be filing our Reply Briefs with the Supreme Court in order to convince the Court to take these two cases. Frankly, we have no choice. If we walked away now, the Summum ruling could easily lead to a Statue of Tyranny being erected adjacent to our Statue of Liberty, simply because government bodies are now obligated to express all competing points of views even when the government is the speaker itself. Imagine the local VFW being forced to display anti-military slogans. Imagine government offices all over our country (your town hall, your post office) being obligated to put up an anti-American monument. It's absurd, but it is the actual outcome of this ruling if we do not succeed.

The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals split 6 to 6 and denied a request for rehearing en banc. There were two very strong dissents written in our favor which have served as a basis for our petitions to the Supreme Court. What the Tenth Circuit has said in effect is that once a city accepts donated monuments, even though it becomes the government's speech, whether they:

• depict heroes from WWII, or
• salute veterans of foreign wars, or
• commemorate 9-11 as did one of the cities in our case, or
• acknowledge the Ten Commandments,

the city is now compelled to accept monuments from other groups sounding a counter-message.

This constitutes compelled speech and we strongly argued against it. If a city is conveying a message, it has the right to define the content of what it would like to say.

Again, our briefs are due on March 1st and we expect to receive the Opposition Briefs in the next 48 hours.