McCreary County v. ACLU of Kentucky
| McCreary County v. ACLU of Kentucky | |
|---|---|
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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 government violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment in three ways: The first way was that they were displaying the Ten Commandments in isolation; the second for showing the Commandments along with other religious passages; the third for presenting the Commandments in a presentation of the "Foundations of American Law" exhibit. | |
| Court membership | |
| 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.
After two Kentucky Counties posted large and readily visible copies of the Ten Commandments in their courthouses, and a school district in a third county posted a similar display, 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." 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.
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