Posted on 10/21/2004 3:38:12 AM PDT by blitzgig
The Supreme Court had no choice last week. Confronting a nationwide issue of church and state, the court had to accept two cases involving display of the Ten Commandments on public property. One case came from Kentucky. Said the 6th Circuit: The Constitution forbids such a display.
The other case came from Texas. Said the 5th Circuit: The Constitution does not forbid such a display.
Both cases involve the same 10 words in the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion."
Every word seems clear enough for everyday understanding. In truth, every word has become mired in the murk of precedent. By interpretative legerdemain, the defining word "Congress" has been amended to mean "Congress and the state legislatures." The words "no law" have been interpreted to mean "many laws." The word "respecting" has been pummeled into a meaning of "affecting, mentioning, touching upon, having vaguely to do with." The words "establishment" and "religion" have been similarly washed, dyed and dried in the laundry of appellate jurisdiction.
This is the trail that led to Kentucky a year ago. The case, No. 03-1693, involved a display of framed copies of the Ten Commandments in the courthouses of McCreary and Pulaski counties and in the public schools of Harlan County. In their final version, the exhibits contained not only the Ten Commandments but also the whole text of the Star-Spangled Banner and divine excerpts from the Declaration of Independence and the Mayflower Compact. The idea was to avoid a challenge under the Establishment Clause by giving Moses some respectable company.
The cosmetic additions proved unavailing. Judge Eric L. Clay, writing for a panel of the 6th Circuit, found the message was still "patently religious." In a remarkably dyspeptic review of the case, he said the defendants allegedly obtained new counsel. They allegedly acted on the belief that the Ten Commandments could be displayed within the parameters of the Constitution. To buttress this alleged connection to American legal codes, the counties had offered only irrelevant evidence. Why the pejorative spin? Acid stomach?
Judge James L. Ryan, dissenting, found the displays constitutional "in every respect." Nothing in the framed excerpts, he said, "even hints at a primarily religious purpose." He charged his colleagues with attributing to reasonable observers "an utter lack of common sense, a profound ignorance of American history, and, arguably, an outright hostility to religion in our nation's public life." He had it exactly right.
The Texas case, No. 03-1500, was a win for Moses. The case dates from a day in 1961 when the Fraternal Order of Eagles donated to the state a 6-foot granite monument to the Ten Commandments. The slab of stone, appropriately engraved, was installed in Austin between the Capitol and the state supreme court. Forty years later, a Texas citizen, Thomas Van Orden, walked by. He might simply have averted his eyes from the awful sight, but no. He found the monument so unbearably offensive that he sued to have it removed. He lost.
Speaking through Judge Patrick E. Higginbotham, a three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit ruled in favor of the state. The guiding principle, said Higginbotham, is one of governmental neutrality. Hostility to religion "is not only not required, it is proscribed." He quoted Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in a landmark case in 1989: Nothing in the Establishment Clause prevents government from recognizing in some degree "the central role religion plays in our society."
Over the past five years, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union have busied themselves in filing Ten Commandment cases around the country. The devil, they say, finds work for idle hands to do. At the moment, the score among the federal circuits stands, Pharaoh 4, Moses 3. State supreme courts are similarly divided.
In this constitutional affray, I go with Mo. In my view, the controversial plaques and monuments have an educational purpose that fully accords with the aims of a literate society. Our citizens ought to be exposed to Exodus just as they ought to be exposed to Hamlet, Beethoven's Ninth and the rule of the infield fly. These are cultural institutions. Nothing in the Constitution forbids government simply to recognize the role of religion in our public life. In one way or another, we have been recognizing that role for 200 years.
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ARGGHHHH!
I am so sick and tired of the courts prostituting the LAW!
The Constitution is only a contract between the states and the centralized government that was constructed to ensure standardized regulations between the ENTITIES known as states, such as one state buying or selling something to another state. It has absolutely NOTHING to do with the physical or natural world.
The Constitution neither endorses or forbids the display of the 10 Commandments because (being artificial in nature) government cannot HAVE a religion!
The only reason government and the courts continue to try to obliterate Christianity is because the way our country was founded, the people are under a totally DIFFERENT set of laws than the government is!
These laws for the people (moral, or natural laws) also restricted government in that neither a person OR the government has a right to lie, cheat, steal, etc.
Such as;
Christianity is part of the Common, or Natural Law. Therefore it is Christianity that is the basis of our government. Religion of any other type is not synonymous with the American experience of Liberty!" God . . . is the promulgator as well as the author of natural law.
Justice James Wilson, a signer of the Declaration, the Constitution, Original Justice on the U. S. Supreme Court, and the father of the first organized legal training in America.
The law of nature being coeval with mankind, and dictated by God Himself, is of course superior to and the foundation of all other laws. . . . No human laws are of any validity if they are contrary to it; and such of them as are of any validity, derive all their force and all their authority, mediately or immediately, from their original.
William Findley, Revolutionary Soldier, Member of Congress
We have staked the future of all our political institutions upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God. The future and success of America is not in this Constitution, but in the laws of God upon which this Constitution is founded.
- President James Madison
1924, the Oregon Supreme Court declared:
No official is above the law. “Thou shalt not bear false witness” is a command of the Decalogue, and that forbidden act is denounced by statute as a felony.
1988, the Supreme Court of Mississippi, citing the Decalogue, reproached a prosecutor for introducing accusations during cross-examination of a defendant for which the prosecutor had no evidence:
When the State or any party states or suggests the existence of certain damaging facts and offers no proof whatever to substantiate the allegations, a golden opportunity is afforded the opposing counsel in closing argument to appeal to the Ninth Commandment. “Thou shalt not bear false witness . . . ” Exodus 20:16.
I can go on and on with historical and legal quotes, but the point is that government MUST continue to eradicate the fact that our country was founded with unchangeable, moral concepts in order to continue it's illegitimate exercise of power.
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