What fun! A Ten Commandments case!

Ten Commandments display will get high court review

The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled next week to consider the case involving a Ten Commandments monument on Haskell County Courthouse property in Stigler, but the legal discussion got a head start Friday at the University of Oklahoma.

Political science professor emeritus Peter Irons, of the University of California at San Diego, and law professor Thomas Berg, of the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, discussed legal opinions on the separation of church and state during "Signs of the Times: The First Amendment and Religious Freedom.” A panel discussion followed.

"The Supreme Court is scheduled to consider the petition at its conference on Feb. 19,” Irons wrote of Green v. Haskell County in his outline, "with the outcome hard to predict.”

The monument with the Ten Commandments was erected in 2004 outside the Haskell County Courthouse. Haskell County resident James Green and the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit the next year to remove it, claiming the monument violated the First Amendment separation of church and state.

Above I have a picture of the Ten Commandments--and just for the sake of showing that they are kind of biased, and actually, not necessarily representative of our legal system, I just wanted to go through them a bit:

I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

This one is really hard to square with the First Amendment right off the bat. The government can't explicitly erect a law favoring the Abrahamic god, so implicitly, the worship of other Gods can go on, and does. Some people worship Pan of the grove. Some are keen on Father Odin. Some elevate Lucifer the Morning Star. Some are initiate in the mysteries of Osirus. They are not Jehovah-firsters. And the Constitution does not discriminate against them.

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.

Well, we do! I, for example, am an afficionada of eastern art. My decor has several Buddhas, a couple Shivas, a bronze Durga astride a lion. They would qualify as "graven images", as would my handsome little plaster relief of the Goat of Mendes, my Ganesh--and I have little jade fishes! Actually, many homes throughout the country have various statuary, some devotional, some not. But just generically, "graven images" could include garden gnomes. I like to think of this artistic expression as also a First Amendment issue.

Thou shalt not take the name of thy Lord in vain.

This one reminds me of old Reverend Wiley Drake. For some reason, with a name like Rev. Wiley Drake, I picture him as a duck with a collar. Can't help myself, really. But that is neither here nor there. He recently expressed that the lately departed Rep. John Murtha was on the list of people he was targeting with "imprecatory prayer." Now, he might decide to chalk that in his "win" column, but I've wondered if using the Lord's name in vain couldn't mean something a bit more intimate to the Lord, his God, than uttering the occasional (and First Amendment-protected!) good "Goddamn!"

What if you puffed yourself up with maintaining works were the works of the Lord when for all you knew, they were serendipity? What if you claimed you heard God when you didn't? This would be an act a little more brazen than when Moses drew water from the rock without doing it in God's name. Just a theological kind of point I turn around in my mind occasionally, what with the Bible being written in symbolic language at times.

Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy.

As a kid, I thought Moses threw this one in, kind of like a union rep. "God, when you did the 'universe' job, you got to take a break after six days--my folks would like that since they have had to labor for their bread since the unfortunate 'apple incident'. Can we work this 'day off' thing into the contract?" But what day should that really be? And can the US government enforce any particular day?

Honor thy Father and Mother.

You know, it is sometimes illegal to do that. Really. If your parent was a felon, you could do time for harboring them. Thanks to the War on Drugs, there was even propaganda back in the '80's that you should rat out your folks if they were holding. Also, there are numerous incidents of settled case law where the government can step in in loco parentis in the best interests of the child, for example where the child faces endangerment. (Our government would have stepped in on what Abraham meant to do to Isaac, for instance--no question.)

Thou shalt not kill.

Except the Bible itself goes on to justify capital punishment and war. Lots and lots of capital punishment and war. The whole Book of Joshua is about wiping masses of people out. We have laws on the books about not doing murder here in the U.S. You can be sent to death row for it.

Thou shalt not commit adultery.

This might be more nearly our national past-time than baseball! If you're any kind of political junky, you can probably tote up a dozen adulterers--maybe some of them resigned in disgrace. But although the odd, arcane "alienation of affection" law might rest on the books, it's only kind of prejudicial in a divorce. We don't send people to jail for it.

Thou shalt not steal.

This is a good one. I think you should not hoodwink, hornswoggle, overcharge, "hidden fee", fine print, or otherwise dupe regular folks as a point of good business, either. But folks do, and they find the most tortuous legal loopholes to do it, too.

Thou shalt not bear false witness.

This means, broadly--"Don't lie", although to be generous, it means "Don't lie in a trial." People lie all the time. Sometimes without even meaning to. Sometimes just to cast themselves in a better light--and we have laws to prevent people from self-incrimination. Is that a sin of omission? To represent yourself as good by not betraying yourself? One wonders.

Thou shalt not covet.

And this last one is not any kind of law, and is possibly un-American. Of course we covet the things our neighbor has! Why else do we get up and go to work? We might not covet his wife, but his car? It could be a sweet ride. I have coveted things I saw other people wear, and it only made me happy to work overtime to afford them. If coveting can bring out the best in a person--how bad is that?

So, um, Ten Commandments. I don't really get why this has become such a "thing", you know?