High court hits another low point

To start with, we have heard no one - not one voice - call for a state-sponsored religion in the United States of America.

And such a voice - were it raised - would be drowned in a sea of shame, as the voices of the millions would be raised up against it.

So therefore, the First Amendment, with its clear and commanding language that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" is in full force. There has plainly been no move afoot - either public or hidden - to "establish" a state religion in our freedom-loving country.

Yet that does not mean that our country is not in large measure religious. It plainly is, and always has been, and the First Amendment also addresses that notion when it prescribes Congress from making any law "prohibiting the free exercise" of religion.

The question thus naturally arises whether we citizens may "freely exercise" our religious beliefs in a government setting at the same time that we ensure that government shall not "establish" a religion with the power of the state behind it.

The Supreme Court was asked to weigh in on that issue during this current term in two cases involving the use of the Ten Commandments on public property, and the court resoundingly answered: "We dunno."

You would think the matter would have been settled long ago. After all, Congress has a chaplain who opens each day's work with a prayer, various oaths of office and court are sworn in the name of God, and the money printed by our very own constitutional government affirms to all the world, "In God we trust."

It seems plain that the framers of the Constitution never intended to prevent the people of the United States from acknowledging their deeply held religious beliefs. But they did want to ensure that those beliefs could not be used as a club to intimidate or indoctrinate other citizens.

Now, however, it is the First Amendment which is used as a club - to beat religious folks into submission, and the high court has - with its pair of ambiguous rulings - done nothing to take that club away.

In one case from Kentucky, the court ruled 5-4 that the Ten Commandments were not permissible on government property if there is a religious purpose behind the display. In the other case, from Texas, the court ruled with a different 5-4 majority that the Ten Commandments were acceptable in large part because no one had complained about them for 40 years.

The logic of such rulings is full of sophistry, and they ultimately tell us more about the justices than about the Constitution.

Take the first ruling. We are led to believe, for instance, that the Ten Commandments may be posted in a government setting if they are used because of their importance to history and law rather than their importance to religion. But tell that to an atheist. The only people who will want to promote the importance of Moses and the laws handed down on Mount Sinai will be those who already accept their importance to religion. And those who dispute their religious validity will object to them in any context.

The logic of the second ruling is even more specious. It concludes that because the use of the Ten Commandments in a Kentucky courthouse was met with immediate objections in 1999, then they must go. Whereas the Texas monument had stood quietly on the grounds of the Statehouse for 40 years with no commotion. What that means is two different standards of law - one for monuments that were placed when religion was an accepted part of public life in America and another for monuments that were built after the ACLU and its ilk took control of the legal system and filed lawsuits over every prayer, chaplain, and religious motto in the country.

The good news for Flathead County is that our own Ten Commandments monument at the old county courthouse may be "grandfathered" in - because it too is 40 years old, and it too was little noticed until a liberal think tank from Washington, D.C., tried to smash it with a legalistic hammer.

The bad news for all of us is that these rulings show our court system is in a shambles. By basing their rulings on narrow points of personal preference, rather than constitutional principle, the justices revealed that our once-inalienable rights are today as disposable as the rest of our culture.