Posted on 09/01/2003 12:16:40 PM PDT by quidnunc
Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore's pugnacious campaign to make the Ten Commandments the rock on which to build his view of church-state relations in America is almost over.
On Wednesday in Montgomery, a moving company shifted the 5,300-pound monument from the Alabama Judicial Building's rotunda to another area of the building, and the state's attorney general predicted it would be removed entirely by the end of the week.
The judge's effort to redraw the line between church and state has struck a responsive chord among evangelical Christians hungry for a champion in the nation's "culture war," but it was doomed, even conservative attorneys say.
"You can't ethically advise your client to disobey a court's order, no matter how much you disagree with the order," said Matt Staver, of Liberty Counsel, a Longwood firm specializing in church-state issues.
The controversy over the Ten Commandments in Alabama evolved into a test of sovereignty between the federal government and one state judge, with a preordained outcome. But, in a larger sense, it is the latest round of a 200-year debate on the division between government and religion.
Installation of the monument in the summer of 2001 provided a rallying point for those who think religion should be front and center in public life — and that Christianity is under assault.
"I do think it's part of the larger culture war," said David T. Morgan, retired professor of history at the University of Montevallo in Alabama.
"So many people in this state are convinced that the country is going to hell, and here's a man who is standing up for old-time religion and old-time values," said Morgan, author of The New Crusades, the New Holy Land: Controversy in the Southern Baptist Convention, 1969-1991.
At the same time, the Ten Commandments controversy provided a target for those who think the line of separation between church and state is being blurred.
The Rev. Barry Lynn, head of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, called the monument's removal "a tremendous victory for the rule of law and respect for religious diversity."
Partisans on both sides are working from the same texts, starting with the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
However, there is considerable disagreement on the meaning of the texts.
Moore's supporters argue that the passage was written by the Founding Fathers to avoid giving one Christian denomination favored or official status. Because most of the framers were at least nominal Christians, his supporters say, they assumed they were creating a Christian nation. Thus, evangelicals maintain that removing the monument is, in effect, abridging the free exercise of religion.
Moore's opponents rely on President Thomas Jefferson, who provided his interpretation of the passage in a letter to the Danbury, Conn., Baptist Association on Jan. 1, 1802.
"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God," the president wrote, "I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State."
Recently, the Rev. Jerry Falwell has dismissed Jefferson's explanation of the separation of church and state as a "shadowy phrase culled from a letter."
But Robert Parham, director of the Baptist Center for Ethics in Nashville, sharply disagreed.
Parham said Jefferson "clearly interpreted the religious liberty clause in the First Amendment to mean the separation of church and state."
The federal courts consistently have agreed with Jefferson's interpretation. They also have ruled that where the Constitution says "Congress" in the First Amendment, the passage applies to all arms of government — federal, state and local.
-snip-
Where should the line of separation be drawn between church and state?
"The answer lies somewhere between the extremists who want to impose Christian values, mainly Protestant, on everyone else, and their secular counterparts, who want to ban religion completely from public life and make it a purely private matter," said Steinmetz.
"This society will accept neither extreme. What we need to do is what we are doing; we need to argue it out. The good news is that we live in a robust democracy. It will survive this disagreement."
(Excerpt) Read more at centredaily.com ...
The standoff between a federal appeals court and Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore over the public display of the 10 Commandments illustrates two extremes in the ongoing struggle to define America. Unfortunately, neither will serve the cause of religion in public life.
On one side are Judge Moore and his allies, who are contesting a federal court order to remove Moore's 2.5-ton monument from the Alabama judicial building. In their efforts to defend the Constitution, they risk transforming it into a religious document. Moore claims he would be "guilty of treason" if he didn't fight to keep the 10 Commandments in the courthouse rotunda. The Rev. Jerry Falwell agrees that the federal ruling should be ignored. "We believe breaking man's law is needed to preserve God's law," he told thousands of Moore supporters at a rally last week. They're now appealing the court's ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The problem with this argument is that America is not a biblical commonwealth, and the Constitution is not the Law of Moses. The American framers, keenly aware of the religious wars that ravaged most of Europe, deliberately kept religious doctrine out of the document. That's why Article VI insists that there be "no religious test" for public office.
It's also a bit curious that Moore, an evangelical Protestant, is so devoted to what amounts to a public symbol of his faith. It was, after all, the medieval obsession with icons and religious legalism that helped ignite the Protestant Reformation. Though revering the 10 Commandments, evangelicals have always emphasized a "religion of the heart" — a personal relationship with Jesus that doesn't confuse a living faith with the trappings of orthodoxy. Even the evangelical magazine Christianity Today has warned that a fixation with posting the 10 Commandments "runs the danger of becoming an idol."
But if Moore is pressing for a sacred public square, his critics want to secularize it. They're ignoring the profound influence of Christianity on the American founding.
That influence was such that even Thomas Jefferson, a critic of organized religion, allowed church services to be conducted in the chambers of the Supreme Court. It's no accident that the central figure in the frieze adorning the east facade of the Supreme Court is Moses, clutching the 10 Commandments, above the words "the guardian of liberty."
The framers drafted a secular Constitution. They insisted that, unlike the European experience, America would have no established church or official creed. But Americans had, and in many ways still have, an unofficial creed: a belief in the God of the Bible.
-snip-
(Joseph Loconte [Chicago Tribune] in The Heritage Foundation, August 26, 2003)
To Read This Article Click Here
And here is the crux of you and your fellow looney tunes problem.
The SCOTUS and the Executive branch of our republic DO NOT MAKE LAWS!
President Jeffersons letter to a Baptist in Danbury, CT has all the force of legal precedent as me blowing my nose.
The Wall is built on illegal and unconstitutional precedent precedent that might pass muster in a monarchy but not in a constitutional republic.
Brilliant analysis. If the monument makes it to Better Homes and Gardens it's constitutional, if it doesn't it's unconstitutional.
Actually your argument has more merit than Presidents making laws becasue it at least has some input from the citizens who read Better Homes and Gardens.
Chief Justice Rehnquist notes that (1) This comment was years after the amendment was written, and (2) That Jefferson was overseas in France when it was drafted and written. He also notes that Jefferson meant his statement in the sense that "government should keep their hands off of religion."
That interpretation puts Jefferson clearly in the camp of the strict constructionists who say the Fed has no business getting involved in religion.
Just so!
And what it might well do is poison the well for future battles over harmless — even beneficial — things such as Nativity scenes, angels and other mild quasi-Christian expressions in Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving celebrations and decorations.
Roy's rock was simply a bridge too far.
Another frog in the slow boil pot.
Could you point me to the section of the US Constitution that deals with reasonable and unreasonable people.
Here I thought the issues at hand were Constitutional questions.
And who decides who's reasonable and who isn't? You?
Difficult as the case would have been from the start, it was legal arguments presented by Moore's team that rendered the case essentially unwinnable, according to Sekulow."I would have argued the monument and the display are no different than the monument and the display in the United States Supreme Court building," Sekulow said.
"I would not have argued that the First Amendment does not apply to the states. I believe it does, so I would have taken a very different approach, not to say one's right and one's wrong," he said.
While Moore and his lawyers argued that the Ten Commandments monument was permitted under the First Amendment, the legal battleground ultimately shifted to a fight over states' rights — to the dismay of some of the judge's supporters.In large measure, the Civil War was fought to settle the issue of whether the federal government was sovereign over state governments. In the 1950s and 1960s, during the civil rights movement, Alabama and other pro-segregation states in the South raised the same issue — also without success.
The question was settled at Gettysburg and at Appomattox — it's time to stop re-fighting the states'-rights battle.
Another stupid and pitiful argument from the frogs. Of the 55 founders of this nation 52 were Christians and 3 were deists. Mostly Calvinists, a couple of Catholics and a smattering of others. Not a Muslim to be found. That goes to the historical significance of the Ten Commandments' place in American jurisprudence.
Now as for the Koran, it doesn't offend me at all. Like you, I'm neither a book burner nor an enemy of the First Amendment.
In fact, I think it would serve the country well to display relgious books of all kind and discuss them.
Having a Bible, a Koran, the Talmud and any other religious book you want in the court room to be swron on to tell the truth , the whole truth and nothing but the truth is fine with me.
How about you Mr Moderate?
The pesky 10th amendment still exits.
A losing argument if ever there was one.
Well that's one view. Here's another.
It's time to stop worshiping at the altar of the elitist, asshole oligarchs in robes.
Do you believe that the current SCOTUS will rule that the First Amendment does not apply to the states, specifically to a state supreme court justice?
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