DENVER-
A religious group seeking to place monuments of its beliefs in two city parks alongside similar ones to the Ten Commandments won court victories Tuesday, including a ruling that allows it to place its Seven Aphorisms alongside the Christian monument in Pleasant Grove.
A three-judge panel of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the city’s claim that it would be inundated with requests from other individuals and that the park would be flooded with monuments. The panel sent the case back to a lower court, granting the group’s request for an injunction against the city 30 miles south of Salt Lake City.
“The city’s speculative harm cannot outweigh a First Amendment injury, especially because Summum has established a substantial likelihood of success on the merits,” the panel wrote.
Summum claims it follows the teachings of Gnostic Christianity and practices the rites of “modern mummification and transference.” It was incorporated in Utah in 1975, according to the group’s Web site.
Pleasant Grove Mayor Michael Daniels, who wasn’t in office when the suit was filed, said he hadn’t seen the opinion.
“Interesting. Interesting…. I don’t think we anticipated there would be a granting of this injunction,” Daniels said, adding he couldn’t comment until the city attorney reviewed the ruling.
A message left for Brian Barnard of the Utah Legal Clinic in Salt Lake City, which represented Summum in both cases, did not immediately return a call left after business hours.
In its request to the city in September 2003, the group said it wanted its monument to be the same size and similar in nature to the Ten Commandments, which was donated by the Fraternal Order of Eagles three decades earlier.
In a separate ruling by the same panel, the group won the right to challenge Duchesne sale of a 10-foot, by 11-foot parcel of land within a park on which the monument sits. Officials in the city, which is 91 miles east of Salt Lake City, claimed the move satisfied the Constitution’s separation of church and state clause.
The panel called invalid the city’s actions, which included transferring ownership of the parcel the Lion’s Club, “for the club’s work in cleaning and beautifying the city.” Judges also said the city’s solution of selling the parcel to the daughters of a man in whose name the monument was donated to the city in the 1970s could be challenged in court.
Duchesne City officials argued the parcel’s sale to the women for $250, a 4-foot white picket fence surrounding the parcel and a sign disavowing they city’s connection with the monument, satisfied the Constitutional requirements.
The panel disagreed and sent the case back to a lower court to determine whether the monument’s location within a park constitutes a public form and whether the sale to the women followed state law.
Among Summum’s principles: psychokinesis, vibration, opposition, and rhythm.
