| McCreary County v. ACLU of Kentucky | ||||||
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Supreme Court of the United States |
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| Argued March 2, 2005 Decided June 27, 2005 |
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| Full case name | McCreary County, Kentucky, et al., v. American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky, et al. | |||||
| Docket nos. | 03-1693 | |||||
| Citations | 545 U.S. 844 (more) 125 S. Ct. 2722; 162 L. Ed. 2d 729; 2005 U.S. LEXIS 5211; 18 Fla. L. Weekly Fed. S 532 |
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| Prior history | Judgement for plaintiff, 96 F.Supp.2d 679 (E.D. Ky., 2000); affirmed, 354 F.3d 438 (6th Cir., 2003) | |||||
| Subsequent history | injunction denied, 2007 WL 2903210 (E.D. Ky., 2007); judgment amended and permanent injunction granted, unreported (E.D. Ky., 2008); affirmed, 607 F.3d 439 (6th, Cir., 2010) | |||||
| Holding | ||||||
| Displaying the Ten Commandments bespeaks a religious object unless they are integrated with a secular message. The court saw no integration here because of a lack of a demonstrated analytical or historical connection between the Commandments and the other documents. Thus, the displays were in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. | ||||||
| Court membership | ||||||
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| Case opinions | ||||||
| Majority | Souter, joined by Stevens, O'Connor, Ginsburg, and Breyer | |||||
| Concurrence | O'Connor | |||||
| Dissent | Scalia, joined by Rehnquist, Thomas; Kennedy (only as to parts II, III) | |||||
| Laws applied | ||||||
| U.S. Const. amend. I | ||||||
McCreary County v. ACLU of Kentucky, 545 U.S. 844 (2005), was a case argued before the Supreme Court of the United States on March 2, 2005. At issue was whether the Court should continue to inquire into the purpose behind a religious display and whether evaluation of the government's claim of secular purpose for the religious displays may take evolution into account under an Establishment Clause of the First Amendment analysis.
In a suit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held that the displays—in this case, a Ten Commandments display at the McCreary County courthouse in Whitley City, Kentucky and a Ten Commandments display at the Pulaski County courthouse—were unconstitutional. The appeal from that decision, argued by Mathew Staver of Liberty Counsel, urged reformulation or abandonment of the "Lemon test" set forth in Lemon v. Kurtzman, which has been applied to religious displays on government property and to other Establishment Clause issues.
The Supreme Court ruled on June 27, 2005, in a 5-4 decision, that the display was unconstitutional. The same day, the Court handed down another 5-4 decision in Van Orden v. Perry with the opposite outcome. The "swing vote" in the both cases was Justice Stephen Breyer.
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After two Kentucky Counties each posted large and readily visible copies of the Ten Commandments in their courthouses, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued. In response to the suit, and before the district court responded, both counties adopted similar resolutions that clarified the purposes of the displays as acknowledging “the precedent legal code upon which the civil and criminal codes of . . . Kentucky are founded.” After the district court, following the Lemon v. Kurtzman test, entered a preliminary injunction against the newly modified exhibits, finding that there was no secular purpose behind the inherently religious displays.
After changing counsel, the Counties revised the exhibits again. The new posting, entitled "The Foundations of American Law and Government Display," consists of nine framed documents of equal size. One sets out the Commandments explicitly identified as the "King James Version," quotes them at greater length, and explains that they have profoundly influenced the formation of Western legal thought and the American Nation. In addition to the Commandments, the counties added historical documents containing religious references as their sole common element. The additional documents included framed copies of: the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the lyrics of the Star Spangled Banner, the Mayflower Compact, the National Motto, the Preamble to the Kentucky Constitution, and a picture of Lady Justice.
On the ACLU's motion, the district court included this third display in the preliminary injunction despite the counties' professed intent to show that the Commandments were part of the foundation of American Law and Government and to educate county citizens as to the documents. The court took proclaiming the Commandments' foundational value as a religious, rather than secular, purpose under Stone v. Graham and found that the counties' asserted educational goals crumbled upon an examination of this case's history.
The Sixth Circuit Court affirmed the decision, stressing that, under Stone, displaying the Commandments bespeaks a religious object unless they are integrated with a secular message. The court saw no integration here because of a lack of a demonstrated analytical or historical connection between the Commandments and the other documents.
Justice David Souter wrote the opinion of the Court. The Court began by acknowledging that the Court had already acknowledged that the Commandments are "undeniably a sacred text in the Jewish and Christian faiths” and held that their display in public classrooms violated the First Amendment’s bar against establishment of religion." Next, the Court noted that the Lemon Test's "purpose prong" was rarely dispositive. Nonetheless, it emphasized that that prong "serves an important function." Indeed, anytime the government purposefully advances one religion over another, that advancement violates the Establishment Clause.
While the counties asked the Court to overrule the Lemon Test and, necessarily, the inquiry into governmental purpose, the Court refused to do so. The Court noted that, in several areas of the law, an inquiry into the government's purpose is an important endeavor. The Court also stated that it was confident in the inquiry into purpose, because such inquiries had not yield a finding of a "a religious purpose dominant every time a case is filed."
As to the second issue, whether the Court should consider the evolutionary purpose or the most recent purpose, the Court held that it should consider the evolutionary purpose of the display. "But the world is not made brand new every morning, and the Counties are simply asking us to ignore perfectly probative evidence; they want an absentminded objective observer, not one presumed to be familiar with the history of the government's actions and competent to learn what history has to show."
The Court, reviewing the lower court's ruling de novo, upheld the previous ruling, noting that a pastor was present to testify to the certainty of the existence of God at the dedication of one of the displays, the modified displays contained "theistic and Christian references," and the common thread of Christian "purpose" in the third modification.
In November 2010, counties in Kentucky filed a new appeal to the Supreme Court, requesting the allowance of the display once again. The case is again titled McCreary County v. ACLU of Kentucky. The plaintiffs do not seek to "overrule" the decision in the original case. Instead, they claim that the Sixth Circuit Court has failed to follow the majority's comment allowing government to reform the reasoning of a display to render it constitutional. The plaintiffs argue in their appeal that local government has given a firm secular reasoning for the display as the commemoration of historical documents and have renounced the religious motivation for the display, which was the court's reasoning for its prohibition.[1]