Ohio Ten Commandments Case Appealed to Supreme Court
by Jim Brown
July 14, 2004
(AgapePress) - The highest court in America has been asked to clarify conflicting rulings that have been handed down by several U.S. circuit appeals courts concerning Ten Commandments displays.The American Center for Law and Justice has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a January 2004 appeals court decision banning Ten Commandments monuments at four public schools in Adams County, Ohio. The case stems from a 1999 lawsuit filed against the school board over those displays, which resulted in a lower-court ruling that the displays were unconstitutional.
Once the county realized its initial posting of the Ten Commandments violated existing law, it tried to fix the problem by displaying the Decalogue in an appropriate historical context along with such documents as the U.S. Constitution, the Magna Carta, and the Declaration of Independence. However, the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati ruled that once a school district has violated the First Amendment's Establishment Clause, there is nothing it can ever do to undo that violation.
ACLJ senior counsel Frank Manion believes the case should have ended when the county changed the display in 2002. He says the court of appeals basically told the school board it could never "get forgiveness" and that nothing it could do in the future would convince the court that the district had "anything other than a covert, stealth religious purpose" in what it was doing. "We think that's ridiculous," Manion says.
The ACLJ attorney says he is hopeful the high court will examine its own precedent by clarifying what it meant in the Stone v. Graham case, the one time he says the Supreme Court weighed in on the issue of Ten Commandments displays in the context of public schools.
"What they said was that while public schools were forbidden by the Constitution to display the Ten Commandments as a religious text for a religious purpose, there was nothing to prevent them from displaying the Ten Commandments in an appropriate study of history, of world civilization, of comparative religion, or ethics or the like," he explains.
According to the ACLJ, the Sixth Court's decision conflicts with other decisions involving display of the Ten Commandments in the Third, Fifth, and Tenth Circuits. The legal group says such conflicts in the federal circuits often result in the Supreme Court taking a case to resolve conflicting decisions.
