Ten Commandments in Public -- An Issue That Won't Go Away
by Allie Martin
November 5, 2003
(AgapePress) - A Christian attorney says the nation's highest court will eventually have to tackle the issue of the public display of the Ten Commandments.Earlier this week, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear two appeals from Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who has been suspended for refusing to obey a federal court order to remove a granite Ten Commandments monument from the state's judicial building in Montgomery. Despite that decision, Moore says the issue will not go away -- and that he has just begun to fight, perhaps implying he would seek public office if he is removed from his judicial post for snubbing the court order.
Mat Staver, president of Liberty Counsel, agrees with Moore that the issue eventually must be addressed -- and says that it will ultimately wind up at the Supreme Court of the United States.
Mat Staver | |
"I would think that within the next two years, the Supreme Court would not only take a case but decide a case involving the display of the Ten Commandments," Staver says.But even if that happens, the attorney says, it may not solve the issue in all cases involving public display of the Decalogue because those displays involve different scenarios. "There are displays where the Commandments are by themselves, and there are displays where [the Commandments] are in the context of other historical documents," he explains. Liberty Counsel reports it has come out on top in cases involving both of those situations -- one in Texas, the other in Kentucky.
In light of the décor found in the Supreme Court, Staver finds it somewhat ironic that the high court will eventually have to rule on the issue of the public acknowledgment of God.
"Even in the United States Supreme Court, Moses with the Ten Commandments is the prominent figure right over the chief justice's head. He's not only there, but he's also in other areas of the Supreme Court," he says. "So if we were to eliminate the Ten Commandments, we would have to do an architectural revision of even our [own] Supreme Court."
According to Staver, there are about 20 different Ten Commandments cases in U.S. courts. Liberty Counsel itself is working on ten such cases.
