Why remove the Ten Commandments?
Why is it that people who claim not to take God seriously in their own lives insist on taking Him so seriously for the rest of us?
A few years ago, city officials in Bloomfield, N.M., agreed to set aside space on public property near City Hall for a series of privately funded monuments that would “acknowledge and commemorate the history and heritage of its law and government.” No specific material was designated for inclusion. That would be left to the people of Bloomfield.
So far, private citizens have erected — on their own dime — monuments celebrating the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address and … the Ten Commandments.
One of these is not like the others. The Ten Commandments have exerted considerably more global influence through the years. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine words with more profound or lasting impact on the “law and government” not just of Bloomfield, but of Western civilization as a whole.
The Decalogue does carry with it certain religious connotations, but that doesn’t disqualify it as a document of great importance to the founders of our nation. Nonetheless, all too aware that some would take exception to a Bible excerpt positioned in close proximity to City Hall, Bloomfield officials took enormous care to disassociate themselves from the message while allowing for its reasonable, free expression.
Engraved on each monument, including the one for the Ten Commandments, is this message:
PRESENTED TO THE PEOPLE OF SAN JUAN COUNTY BY PRIVATE CITIZENS RECOGNIZING THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THESE LAWS IN OUR NATION’S HISTORY JULY 4, 2011 ANY MESSAGE HEREON IS OF THE DONORS AND NOT THE CITY OF BLOOMFIELD
In addition, next to the Ten Commandments monument is a red-lettered sign that reads, in part: “The City has intentionally opened up the lawn around City Hall as a public forum where local citizens can display monuments that reflect the City’s history of law and government. Any message contained on a monument does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the City, but are statements from private citizens.”
Not only did city officials contribute no monies for the monument, but none of them participated in organizing or leading a dedication ceremony held by the citizens who erected it. And the monument itself — like others on the lawn — is small enough that one has to walk right up to it to read the words. From the nearest street, it’s hard to tell the Ten Commandments from the Bill of Rights.
All of which constitutes considerable effort on behalf of elected officials to stand clear of any accusations that they’ve failed to separate church from state.
Jane Felix and B.N. Coone filed a federal lawsuit several years ago demanding that the monument be removed. Why? Because, they say, their personal beliefs embrace more Wiccan and polytheistic themes, and they disagree with what’s written in the Decalogue. They are free to display their own historical monument, but instead of voicing their own opinions, they’ve opted to silence the speech of others. Just knowing the Ten Commandments are displayed on public property makes them feel “excluded.”
A federal appeals court has actually endorsed that argument and ruled against the city. Alliance Defending Freedom (the legal group I work for) is representing city officials and last week asked the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the case. Not long ago, the court issued two opinions regarding similar Decalogue displays on the same day. One (McCreary County v. ACLU) struck down a public display of the Commandments; the other (Van Orden v. Perry) upheld their display. Not unpredictably, this lack of clarity has prompted widespread confusion in courts coast to coast.
Which raises two questions for the court in the Bloomfield case: 1) Are Ten Commandments displays on government property an inherent violation of the Establishment Clause or not? And 2) Does the fact that two people simply do not like such a display really qualify them to invoke the Establishment Clause?
That clause — declaring that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” — comes from the same First Amendment that forbids the government from “prohibiting the free exercise” of religion “or abridging the freedom of speech.” Both of those latter ideas seem considerably more endangered by Felix and Coone’s lawsuit than the people of Bloomfield are by a monument commemorating the Ten Commandments.
Consider, after all, what Bloomfield officials did not do. They did not require every church in the city to contribute to the monument or embrace its message. They didn’t start sponsoring revival services on the City Hall lawn. They didn’t insist that the citizens of their community come by and read the Commandments on a regular basis, then genuflect before moving on.
Even Felix and Coone admit that the Commandments are hard to make out unless you make it a point to stop, walk up and read them (which Coone never has). If the city is, in fact, trying to establish a religion, they’re somehow going about it in ways both too blatant and too subtle.
So the litigants’ arguments come down to this: “We don’t like the idea. And there’s no room on public property for ideas we don’t like.”
If this viewpoint carries the day, will we soon be seeing some serious reconstruction at the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials — both of whose walls are adorned with writings that reference the Almighty?
That’s silly, you say. It would never go that far. But exactly how far can we gamble on the “reasonableness” of people who want to remove every harmless public mention of a God they don’t personally believe exists?
We have already seen the rising danger to free speech played out — sometimes with violence — on university campuses across the country. This is an especially good time for the Supreme Court to reaffirm, as it did in 2014, that adults “often encounter speech they find disagreeable; and an Establishment Clause violation is not made out any time a person experiences a sense of affront from the expression of contrary religious views.”