Court rules government has free speech rights, too
In a unanimous ruling today, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Pleasant Grove City, Utah, is not required under the First Amendment to give equal display in a public park to the teachings of any and all religions.
A quack, tax-dodging pseudo-religious group out of Salt Lake City calling themselves Summum wanted their “Seven Aphorisms” — including such nonsense as “Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates." — erected in a park, equating their tenets to those of the Ten Commandments monument already located in the park.
In writing for the court Justice Samuel Alito quoted from a prior court ruling that said, “If every citizen were to have a right to insist that no one paid by public funds express a view with which he disagreed, debate over issues of great concern to the public would be limited to those in the private sector, and the process of government as we know it radically transformed.”
While government may not regulate private free speech on public property, Alito wrote, permanent monuments displayed on public land typically represent government speech.
Whatever else you say about the ruling from the staunchly conservative Alito, you have to chuckle at a high court ruling with a footnote quoting the lyrics of John Lennon’s “Imagine.”
"Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world ..."
In a philosophical meandering in his opinion Alito raised questions of about the meaning of messages in art and monuments. He cited a Greco-Roman mosaic of the word “Imagine” in New York’s Central Park and asked what it means. He asked the same of a statue of Pancho Villa presented to the city of Tucson. “Does this statue commemorate a ‘revolutionary leader who advocated for agrarian reform and the poor’ or ‘a violent bandit’?”
In the end, Alito concluded, “In sum, we hold that the City’s decision to accept certain privately donated monuments while rejecting respondent’s is best viewed as a form of government speech. As a result, the City’s decision is not subject to the Free Speech Clause, and the Court of Appeals erred in holding otherwise. We therefore reverse.”
You may speak freely but you can’t impose speech on anyone else.
