Atheist groups loved this ruling, because it would have the likely effect of forcing the removal of all monuments with religious content. The atheists would be able to achieve coming in the back door, what they had failed to coming in the front. In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled, in a 5-4 decision, against atheists demanding that the state of Texas remove a Ten Commandments monument donated by a private organization from its state house grounds, which is almost identical to the ones in question in Utah. (See picture above).  The Court pointed out in that case that The Ten Commandments are a part of the nation’s religious heritage and legal tradition have been vital in shaping United States culture; therefore, the state was within its purview to include the monument on its state house grounds. 

The Supreme Court, in Summum, has now added to its 2005 Texas state house ruling providing that not only can governments display The Ten Commandments and other monuments with religious content, they can choose which displays will go on public property and which will not--as they always have. This power does not impinge on peoples’ First Amendment free speech rights: they are free to say and write about what they want, and assemble and advocate and protest in public places including city parks, they just don’t have the power to force governments to accept permanent displays. The Court noted that elected officials also have a free speech right at stake.  If citizens do not like the messages being sent by their elected officials, including in the monuments they choose to display, citizens can always vote them out of office. The Court added, if the government literally had to accept and accomodate all viewpoints as being equal, it would cease to be able to function.   

In my book, We Hold These Truths, I point out that the Founders certainly didn’t consider all beliefs to be equal and based the founding of the nation, in substantial part, on the faith that there are God-given inalienable rights that no government can justly deny. They argued in the Declaration of Independence that based on the “laws of nature and Nature’s God”, the British government had become a tyranny because it was failing to secure those inalienable rights endowed by the “Creator.” The laws of nature are those observable in nature, while the laws of Nature’s God (according to the most prominent legal treaties of the time including Blackstone’s Commentaries) are those recorded in scripture (the Bible) and include The Ten Commandments. These laws create corresponding rights. “Thou shalt not murder”: the right to life; “Thou shalt not steal”: the right to own property; “Thou shalt not bear false witness”: the right not to be falsely accused of a crime; “Honor thy father and thy mother”: the right to have a family. The Founders encapsulated these rights as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and taken together they provide a bulwark against tyranny by one's government and against the unlawful intrusion of one’s fellow man.  They provide the framework to be all one was created to be.       

The belief in God’s overarching laws and the corresponding rights they create has been a vital part of the American political experience, and it should continue to be recognized by the government. Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and many others appealed to this bedrock of American faith to point out the injustice of slavery. Franklin Roosevelt used these laws to weigh the lying, thieving totalitarian regimes of Hitler’s Germany and Imperial Japan in the balance and find them wanting. Martin Luther King, Jr., during the Civil Rights Movement, exposed the nation’s failure to live up to God’s divine laws and called upon it to truly rise up to the nation’s founding vision. 

John Kennedy succinctly restated this nation’s founding vision shortly into his Inaugural Address saying, “For I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forebears prescribed nearly a century and three-quarters ago. The world is very different now…[a]nd yet the same revolutionary belief for which our forebears fought is still at issue around the globe, the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God. We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution.” The Supreme Court’s ruling in Summum enables governments to continue to help us remember these foundational beliefs without having to give equal space and status on public lands to those who want to erect monuments saying there is no God, or truth, or rights endowed by a Creator. That’s something worthy of celebrating with thanksgiving to God!