On Saturday, April 12th, folks from all over Alabama will come together in the capital city of Montgomery to rally in support of a state judge's right to display the Ten Commandments in his courtroom.
These are the Ten Commandments:
- "I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt have no other gods before me.
- Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.
- Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.
- Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.
- Honor thy father and thy mother.
- Thou shalt not kill.
- Thou shalt not commit adultery.
- Thou shalt not steal.
- Thou shalt not bear false witness.
- Thou shalt not covet."
This is the version of the Ten Commandments that hung on the walls in public schools in Kentucky -- until the practice was prohibited by the Supreme Court in the 1980 case of Stone v. Graham. Never mind that the Ten Commandments serve as the fundamental legal code of western civilization and are the basis of the common law of the United States. Never mind that those same commandments were hanging on the wall in the Supreme Court itself on the day this case was decided -- and still hang there 17 years later. The High Court was evidently unable to detect a secular purpose in displaying this historic foundational code in public schools, discerning instead an ominous intermingling of church and state that would lead inexorably to an establishment of religion.
"The Constitution's First Amendment prohibits an establishment of religion," Thomas Jipping, director of the Free Congress Foundation's Judicial Selection Monitoring Project, affirms. He emphasizes, however, that "establishment" and "endorsement" are not the same thing. "Those who put the word 'establishment' in the First Amendment had a particular meaning in mind," Jipping explains. "They meant the creation of a national church or the coercion of individual belief or behavior." Our Founding Fathers, after all, were ardent supporters of religious faith, recognizing it as the essential foundation of our republic.
Jipping argues that the activist judges of today "believe they can take the Constitution's words and simply give them new meanings. Whatever will suit them at the time, that's the meaning they give." And so they interpret "establishment" to mean "endorsement," thereby converting an amendment protecting religious freedom into one forbidding it.
Judge Roy Moore of Alabama will have none of this nonsense. He proudly displays on the wall of his courtroom a small plaque containing the Ten Commandments, and he opens each day's session with a prayer. This quite sensible, and once quite common, behavior seems to have offended the American Civil Liberties Union, which prevailed upon another state judge to order Roy Moore to remove the plaque and desist from praying in court.
If the ACLU expected Judge Moore and the people of Alabama to tolerate this latest outrage, they clearly miscalculated. Governor Fob James has publicly, and emphatically, announced his support for Judge Moore, and the State Supreme Court has issued a stay of the lower judge's order pending appeal. It should be an interesting rally in Montgomery tomorrow.
