Not far from Salt Lake City, home to the United States’s most successful new religious movement, officials are struggling to find reasons not to allow another movement, the Summum church, to erect a monument in a public park:
In 2003, the president of the Summum church wrote to the mayor here with a proposal: the church wanted to erect a monument inscribed with the Seven Aphorisms in the city park, “similar in size and nature” to the one devoted to the Ten Commandments.
The city declined, a lawsuit followed and a federal appeals court ruled that the First Amendment required the city to display the Summum monument. The Supreme Court on Wednesday will hear arguments in the case, which could produce the most important free speech decision of the term.
Continue reading at The New York Times.
In a press briefing on November 19th, Bush’s Press secretary Dana Perino called this issue “a waste of [her] time” in an exchange with World Net Daily’s Les Kinsolving:
Read a transcript of the full briefing here, and see World Net Daily’s coverage here.