SALEM — The further south you go in Utah County, the more determined city officials are to keep Christ in Christmas — at least on the city lawns.
While the bigger cities in Utah County have started using non-religious icons for holiday displays, a few small, mostly rural and largely Mormon cities south of Provo vow to fight any claims that Nativity scenes on public land violate the separation of church and state clause of the U.S. Constitution.
Salem Mayor Randy Brailsford said that a privately funded Nativity scene near the city-owned Salem Pond will not be removed — even if the city must face a legal challenge to keep it.
The pond sports a floating display of Christmas trees and the Nativity scene belongs with it, Brailsford said. "That's where it is and that's where it will stay," Brailsford said defiantly. "The U.S. Capitol has a Nativity display on its grounds."
Meanwhile, ACLU of Utah's executive director, Dani Eyer, says nobody is trying to ruin Christmas.
"We have a long and strong history of defending and supporting religious freedoms," Eyer said. "Government sponsorship of religious expression, we think, undermines the free exercise of religious belief. That's what can't be tolerated under the First Amendment."
Payson's Mayor Bernell Evans said the city has donated $10,000 toward Christmas decorations and will help buy a $40,000 lighted Nativity to display at the Peteetneet Academy and Museum on 600 East.
The purchase of the Nativity has been put on hold because of the cost, not because the city is afraid of complaints. "We'll face it when the time comes," Evans said. "I think we should have a Nativity anywhere."
While money is being raised for the lighted Nativity display, a live Nativity scene complete with camels, donkeys and various other animals is scheduled this year, decoration chairman Willis Pulver said. If the ACLU or any other group should decide to make an issue of it, Pulver says so be it.
"I guess we'll have to go to another court battle," he said. "I suppose they could move us off of public property. If we have a battle, we'll work it out when it comes."
In Spanish Fork, the city sponsors a small Nativity display near the library and offers no apology for it. Goshen Mayor Hortt Carter steps neatly between the line dividing church and state by putting a Nativity on his own front porch.
Provo, the largest city in Utah County, where an estimated 88 percent of the population belong to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has a live Nativity in the Provo Tabernacle Park.
The production is not sponsored by the city — but is included in promotion materials paid for by sponsors of the city's Winterfest.
In Highland, volunteers have traditionally put on the story of the birth in Bethlehem at the LDS Seminary near Lone Peak High School.
Eyer said private displays on public property can be a problem — but only if someone in a particular community complains. "Obviously, we think (putting a creche on publicly owned property) is a bad idea," she said. "It does create the divisiveness we don't want to have."
After a 1999 suit brought against Custer County in Montana was settled, ACLU officials there said removing a creche has never been about Christ but about government.
Custer County officials moved a Ten Commandments monuments and gave away the creche that had been on the county lawn for five years.
"Under our Constitution, the government has no business erecting, accepting, or maintaining religious monuments on public property," said Scott Crichton, then the executive director of the ACLU of Montana, said in a statement then. "Such symbols of faith belong in churches, synagogues and homes, not courthouses and other seats of power of our secular government."
Utah County officials, on the whole, appear to accept the ACLU's viewpoint, though several disagree with it.
"Lindon's council has made a conscious effort to stay away or to separate the sacred nature of the season from the secular primarily because of all the activity and lawsuits and threats all around the nation," said Ott Dameron, city administrator.
"So, we celebrate the season and do it in a rather neutral way, but in our hearts, we are celebrating the true meaning on Christmas."
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