Written by Don Byrd
A trial underway in Bloomfield, New Mexico will decide the fate of a 3,000 pound Ten Commandments monument on the front lawn of city hall. Plaintiffs argue the display is an unconstitutional government endorsement of religion. The City counters by claiming the monument is private speech on what they have deemed a public forum, open to any who wish to place “historical monuments.”
The Albuquerque Journal has more:
Since the Ten Commandments monument was dedicated on July 4, 2011, two other stone monuments have been erected nearby memorializing the Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, [attorney defending the City, Jonathan] Scruggs said.
“We see that private parties are the driving force here,” Scruggs told Senior U.S. District Judge James A. Parker during opening arguments on Monday. Bloomfield had a “secular purpose” of allowing private speech by erecting historical monuments, he said.
…
Andrew Schultz, an Albuquerque attorney working with the ACLU, contends that Bloomfield leaders drove the effort to erect the monument. The project was proposed in 2007 by Kevin Mauzy, a member of the Bloomfield City Council from 2006 to 2010, and approved unanimously by the four-member council.“This is not a free speech case,” Schultz said during opening arguments. “It is a case of government speech.”
Stay tuned.
