Ten
Commandments Victory in Utah
-Victory
Report July 2004 - American Center For Law and Justice
The US District Court in Salt Lake City dismissed a lawsuit challenging the public display of a monument of the Ten Commandments - a monument that had been on display in Pleasant Grove, Utah, since the early 1970s.
The court agreed with the ACLJ about the historical significance of this monument - and that the law is clear concerning the display of the Ten Commandments: in short, that such a monument is constitutional.
The Society of Separationists had sued Pleasant Grove seeking removal of Ten Commandments monuments from the town's municipal park. The monument was donated by the Fraternal Order of Eagles in the early 1970s. (The Eagles donated thousands of monuments to cities across America. )
"No one and no religion has an exclusive claim to the icons of history," US Senior District Court Judge Bruce S. Jenkins declared in dismissing the suit.
"History belongs to all. The placement and display of the monolith at issue in this case is primarily secular in purpose, as an acknowledgment of one historic source of guidance and direction, one time-honored source of standards of human conduct"
Judge Jenkins also stated that the monument is protected by a decision in 1973 of Anderson v. Salt Lake City Corp., in which the US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit (of which Utah is a part) gave deference to history in describing a monument inscribed with the Ten Commandments as "primarily secular, and not religious in character; that neither its purpose or effect tends to establish religious belief."