01 March 2009

The Supreme Court wipes its ass with the Constitution.

The Supreme Court, which has been responsible for many truly terrible decisions, has just handed down one of its worst, and stupidest, in the case of Pleasant Grove v. Summum.
It all started with the Summum, a Gnostic Christian sect which believes (among other things) that Moses came down off the mountain not with Ten Commandments, but with Seven Aphorisms; it was these that Moses broke, and the Commandments replaced them because “Man was not yet ready for the aphorisms.” Why one of these things is considered less likely than the other is a question I’m not going to ask at the moment.
Anyway, back in 1971, the Fraternal Order of Eagles donated a granite monument of the Ten Commandments to the city of Pleasant Grove, Utah. The city decided to display the monument in a park. And then, in 2003, the Summum tried to donate a similar monument of their Seven Aphorisms to the city to sit next to the earlier monument. The city said, “Thanks but no thanks.” So the Summum sued, saying that if the city was going to display the Ten Commandments they had to also display the Seven Aphorisms.
It’s a good argument, a sound logical argument, but as the WSJ LawBlog says, there was no way the Supreme Court was going to rule in their favor and “embrace a doctrine that says that any crackpot who shows up with a slab of granite and a pickup truck can demand that a monument get installed on, say, the National Mall.” Deciding to allow truly free and inclusive permanent religious expression in the park would put a tremendous strain on public lands all across the country. So the obvious solution is the preferable one (both practically and constitutionally) that religious monuments not be allowed on public land at all.
The Court, though, didn’t go for this. They (unanimously!?!) upheld the right of the city to display ONLY the Ten Commandments if they so chose. They couldn’t rule along the lines of the original decision by the city, that the older monument was simply the city permitting the free speech of the donor, because then they would be suppressing the free speech of the Summum. So they went off in a different, frightening direction.
Their logic, as summed up by Samuel Alito, is that the Government has the right to free speech, just like you have, and that in choosing the mainstream Christian monument over the Summum’s alternative, the local government was excercising that right. He wrote: “The placement of a permanent monument in a public park is best viewed as a form of government speech and is therefore not subject to scrutiny under the free speech clause.”
Tell me that I am not the only one who is horrified by this. Tell me I am not the only one who realizes that only the people have the right to free speech. Freedom of speech does not have be to protected for the government, it has to be protected from the government, right?
Let me put it this way: Kansas Senator Sam Brownback is perfectly within his rights to say that all non-Christians are gonna burn in Hell forever. He’s wrong and offensive, but you’ll never hear me say that he doesn’t have the right. However, even if all of his colleagues agreed with him, they wouldn’t have the right to say this collectively. They don’t have the right to publish it as an official Senate resolution, or to make it law. If the government has the right to freedom of speech, how can we restrain them from suppressing everyone else’s?
This isn’t a right/left issue, and it isn’t a religious issue. This is a basic assault on our civil rights. Get angry, folks! Make some noise!