Won

Trinity Lutheran Church wanted to make the playground of its Child Learning Center safer. So, it applied for a grant from a Missouri state program that helped underwrite the cost of adding rubber surfaces. Although the church’s grant application received one of the highest scores in the evaluation process, the state denied the application based on its policy of denying grants to religiously affiliated applicants. The church sued the state over this discriminatory treatment.

Pleasant Grove City, Utah, had placed donated monuments in a city park. However, when adherents of the Summum religion donated a monument, the City declined to place it in the park. Because the city had accepted a Ten Commandments monument, Summum argued that the city must display a monument containing its Seven Aphorisms, and that to refuse violated Summum’s free speech rights. The Supreme Court held that the monuments were government speech, and Summum could not force the city to speak a message it did not want to speak.