Vanity: My Letter to Alabama Attorney General Pryor

Self | 11/11/2003 | Self

[farmer18th]

Dear Mr. Pryor:

Your actions with respect to Judge Moore confuse me.

Is "Thou Shalt Not Steal" offensive to you? (I'm glad I don't own property in Alabama)

Is "Thou Shalt Not Murder" problematic for you? (I'm glad I don't live in Alabama)

Is "Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery" hurtful to you? (I'm glad you don't know my wife.)

Is "Thou Shalt not Bear False Witness" repugnant to you? (I'm glad I never had to seek justice in your state.)

Is "Thou Shalt Have no Other Gods Before Me" distasteful to you? (What with lightning bolts and all, I'm glad I dont worship next to you.)

We are a nation of laws, Mr. Pryor, and not of men. I'm just confused as to which laws you follow.

[EternalVigilance]

Sekulow Weighs in on Ten Commandments Battles


August 27, 2003





CBN.com – The showdown over the Ten Commandments monument in a state judicial building in Alabama is just the latest attempt to remove God and religion from public settings in America. Pat Robertson spoke with Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, for more about the war over whether or not God can be acknowledged in American government.
PAT ROBERTSON: What we are looking at here is pretty simple. A United States federal district Court judge is ordering the Supreme Court chief justice of a sovereign state to obey his order in something that is not established law. And the Supreme Court of the United States, has ducked the issue, and it is leading to a kind of confusion… But there is a definite vendetta against religion on the part of the courts for the last 40, 50, 60 years. They have set out deliberately to separate America from its religious heritage, our Judeo-Christian heritage, and the Ten Commandments are only one of the many evidences.

With us now by telephone to talk more about the Ten Commandments and the law is Jay Sekulow with the American Center for Law and Justice. Jay, how many cases does the American Center for Law and Justice have dealing with the Ten Commandments?

JAY SEKULOW: We’ve got right now, Pat, 10, and they’re literally from coast from coast. The biggest ones we have right now are in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Nebraska. We did obtain a victory at the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Pennsylvania. They had a Ten Commandments plaque that had been in place, for almost 85 years. We filed a major brief in that case, and in fact, a lot of the language we used was picked up by the opinion. There the Third Circuit held the monument was constitutional.

And recently in Kentucky, the U.S. District Court judge there threw out the ACLU's lawsuit trying to get a Ten Commandment's monument removed. The courts though, as you mentioned, are split on this. And the most significant case was the case in Elkhart, Indiana, the case that we took to the Supreme Court. And Chief Justice Rehnquist, in a very unusual move, dissented from a "denial of review" saying that the very monuments that are being removed here were in fact the same as the ones that are depicted in the Supreme Court’s own hearing rooms where they hear the oral arguments.

ROBERTSON: Jay, what is the deal here? This is a U.S. District Court judge. There are a whole lot of those guys. Since when do they get invested with the power to order the Supreme Courts of states around in this fashion and dictate to them? It seems like the Supreme Court of the U.S. should certainly have taken this case and ruled on it.

SEKULOW: Well, here’s the thing, Pat. The fact of the matter is there are almost 4,000 of these monuments of the Ten Commandments in city and county courthouses around the United States, most of them put up by the Fraternal Order of Eagles in the 1950’s. And a perfect example of overreach by the federal courts, is in a case we have in Plattsmouth, Nebraska, where the Fraternal Order of Eagles’ headquarters are. In a park across the street, the Eagles actually own a portion of the property that abuts the park, and they have a Ten Commandments monument there. And the federal court judge in that case actually ordered the removal of the Eagles’ own Ten Commandments monument from their own property because people might think it was owned by the city.

So the federal courts clearly have overreached in most of these cases. As I said, we were successful in Kentucky where the federal court judge dismissed the lawsuit that was brought. But the Supreme Court has continued on three different occasions to refuse to hear these cases, and I’m afraid that there are probably three or four votes that would go our way, but five or six that would not, and that may be the reason they are not taking them.

ROBERTSON: Jay, you have been analyzing the courts. We’ve got that famous Trinity trustees case in 1892 that said America is a Christian nation. Justice Story said the Constitution never intended to prostrate Christianity to the Muslim, for example. These were cases decided for decades by the Supreme Court, and now they’ve turned against religion and against our Judeo-Christian heritage. When did it start?

SEKULOW: It started back in the 1930’s, and the 1940’s in particular. In fact, the predecessor to the Americans United for Separation of Church and State, actually one of the founding members was Justice Hugo Black. He was then a senator from Alabama and one of the founders of this organization. He was on the search committee or set-up committee for this organization. Of course, they’ve been leading the charge in most of these cases. But the hostility toward any kind of religious acknowledgment in the public arena has been going on for over 50 years. This has been, in fact, in this situation — and what we’ve got in Alabama is a perfect example of this. This is where an attractive monument depicting the Ten Commandments, which after all is the foundation for western law, is deemed to be a constitutional violation simply because it is displayed in a court building. And as I said, the Supreme Court of the United States would have to use a sandblaster if they were to remove their own monument.

ROBERTSON: Is this going to lead to civil disobedience? I mean, after all, you’ve got one District Court judge and you’ve got the chief judge of [Alabama’s] Supreme Court. Sooner or later there’s going to be a clash, and the citizens will rise up and say civil disobedience is ordered, we’re under tyranny, we’ve got to do something about it.

SEKULOW: There may be civil disobedience taking place in Alabama. The unfortunate aspect of that situation is, and I’ve said this before, I think the monument could have stayed in place pending the appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States. Justice Roy Moore's lawyers have not yet filed that writ asking the Supreme Court to hear the case. The fact of the matter is a "stay," if it would have been filed, would have been obtained and the monument would have stayed in place while this was appealed, so you would have at least gone to the Supreme Court with the monument still there. In these cases it is always easier to keep a depiction that has religious significance in place than having it removed and then brought back, which always makes it more difficult.

ROBERTSON: Are you saying that Judge Moore and his lawyers were looking for a confrontation when they could have done it an easier way?

SEKULOW: They made a strategy decision, and everyone is entitled to their own strategy, and they did not seek the stay in a timely way. They sought one way after the fact just last week, which was way after the mandate from the case was. So it appears that their strategy was to not obtain the stay and rather to bring this constitutional showdown in Alabama to fruition very early, and that's what they’ve done.

ROBERTSON: Jay, thank you for being with us. And ladies and gentlemen, this is a matter of grave urgency. Jay has won so many of these cases, and he's an expert, probably the leading expert on Ten Commandments cases and he didn't go along with the legal strategy of Justice Roy Moore. I agree with Jay, because I happen to know one of the attorneys representing Moore, and this guy is a fighter, he just likes to fight. And he goes out on extreme positions and expects the courts to go along with it and they don't. We could have won this thing if we had said, "Listen, you have the Ten Commandments in your courtroom in Washington. You have the Ten Commandments over the Speaker’s dais in the House of Representatives. And if we have to take it down in Alabama, you have to take it down out of your building up there in Washington." Had he pitched it that way, he may have been successful.

[EternalVigilance]

Once again, the anti-Christians on FR find their cause of the day.

[jwalsh07]

So when Farmer talks about the code that has sustained Western Civilization for 2000 years, he must be referring to the Code of Justinian and its forebears.

Justinian would have sided with Judge Moore, not you. Sorry, but that's the way it is.

[Looking for Diogenes]

Want more?

Yes please. The citation gives thanks to "the great Governor of the World." Funny, it doesn't even mention God by name. It certainly does not legislate that there is only one particular God and that no others may be worshipped. It does not forbid the creation of graven images. It predates the founding of the United States of America.

So yes, if you want to prove your point please do find some other supportng information that is actually relevant to the First Commandment.

[farmer18th]

God is not above showing Himself to the Romans. Is that the issue you thought was at stake? Or were you seriously arguing that Western Civilization owes more to the cultured pagans--whose colliseums and temples now stand in ruins--or to the tradition of Christ--whose missionaries, doctors, and academics have brought light to the entire globe for the last 2000 years? Are there NGOs I don't know about? Or are the priestesses of Aphrodite teaching African villagers how to pump fresh water?

[reflecting]

"Or maybe they are concerned about their tax status Bingo. (To use a term some of them might care about more than God's law.)"

Wow how amazing, with such easy you demean the pastors of the state......men who have left home and comfort, high paying jobs, subjected thier family to a host of situations, particular to ministry in this post-christian society....yeah they'er really scared about losing thier tax status......let me also say it is a shakey place in you put your self in......again I say you do not know them....

[EternalVigilance]

Want more?

I do. Excellent stuff. :-)

[farmer18th]

Yes please

"...in the year of our Lord, one thousand seven hundred eighty-seven..."

...United States Constitution

[Looking for Diogenes]

Justinian would have sided with Judge Moore, not you. Sorry, but that's the way it is.

George III might have sided with Moore as well.

While our legal systems are based upon Roman Law and English Common Law, we now have our own, fully developed legal code. A legal code which forbids placing explicitly religous monuments in government buildings.

[lugsoul]

If you are gonna resort to silliness like that, you may as well post the Treaty of Tripoli.

[farmer18th]

......let me also say it is a shakey place in you put your self in

..an even shakier place would be standing in ministerial robes and failing to defend the public display of God's law..wouldn't want to be standing anywhere near there...

[reflecting]

I'd be in the Alabama half of the Flora-Bama. close

I am not a lawyer, thus I do not know what Thompson is legally able to do. What he is bound by.....if he is able to rule in a way that would encourage the SCOTUS to revisit the area......

[TheOtherOne]

God wrote the commandments in stone to protect his people from moral idiots like Professor Singer. You would remove those protections? Are you unfamiliar with the axiomatic, or do you believe eternal principles of justice are up for a vote?

Roy's stone is not the 10 commandments, it is a replica. That's all. That rock protects nobody. The word of God is not altered whether this stone stands or not.

[Looking for Diogenes]

" Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth."

[EternalVigilance]

Each case of each pastor is an individual one. Same goes for everyone else too.

Some may be exhibiting timidity.

Can't they take that much criticism without you going off about how bad it is to judge them?

There are sins of omission and not just ones of commision, after all.

And no pastor, no man, is utterly free of impurity, as you well know.

If this free republic has a chance to be renewed, the best one is for the pulpits to rise up, as they did in the original revolution that brought us such hard-earned and precious blessings.

But a dead pulpit is worse than useless to God or men.

[lugsoul]

His opinion was nowhere near as critical of Moore as the one written by conservative 11th Circuit Judge Ed Carnes, who practically bemoaned the legal standard he is required to use. However, Moore's arrogant and condescending legal arguments invited the court to flog him.

Here's a bit of advice for anyone who is ever before a judge or other decision maker - it is usually not helpful to defiantly tell them they have no power over you BEFORE they issue their ruling.

[EternalVigilance]

"...in the year of our Lord, one thousand seven hundred eighty-seven..."

They hate that one. Hehe...

[Chancellor Palpatine]

You really ought to turn off TBN sometime, and start reviewing that which you are presented.

You have been making a point that Mosaic law is the font of Western civilization, and I showed that you were, as always, incorrect.

[farmer18th]

If you are gonna resort to silliness like that..

Silliness? Acknowledging the birth of the world's Savior in the concluding lines of the Constitution. Silliness did you say?

"The Lord reigneth; let the earth rejoice; let the multitudes of isles be glad thereof.... If you ask an American, who is his master? He will tell you he has none, nor any governor, but Jesus Christ.... No king but King Jesus"

Jonathan Trumbull, Colonial Governor of Connecticut

[Looking for Diogenes]

"...in the year of our Lord, one thousand seven hundred eighty-seven..." They hate that one. Hehe...

"Anno Domini" doesn't bother me, but it does bother Jews. I guess they aren't included in that part of the Ten Commandments.