Ten Commandments Reflections

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS JUDGE BY DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS "I will never deny the God upon whom our laws and country depend," declared Alabama's chief justice Roy Moore in the year 2003 of the Common Era, and his supporters cheered, fell to their knees and prayed outside of the state courthouse. Judge Moore, the 'Ten Commandments Judge', was an Etoway County circuit judge. While serving in that lower capacity, he posted a plaque of the Ten Commandments in his courtroom, and fought opponents over the display, wherefore the purportedly sovereign people of democratic Alabama were greatly pleased and elected him to lead the superior court, apparently not as an equal among equals. In 2002 Judge Moore set up another scene by placing a shrine to the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building. The fetish is a 5,300 pound granite block upon which a truncated and revised version of the Hebrew tribal commandments appear in the form of Moses' tablets. A wate...

THE PROPER STATE IS SECULAR BY DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS An elected chief justice of Alabama recently refused to obey a judicial order to remove a two and one-half ton granite shrine to the Decalogue that he had surreptitiously slipped into the courthouse rotunda around midnight one night. The reason he gave for disobeying the positive law of his peers was that true American law has its origin in his god, hence he declared that the federal judge and his colleagues on the state supreme court had violated god's law by placing themselves above god and above the law. After all, the First Table of the Law establishing Hebrew theocracy, as edited for the shrine, explicitly stated, "I am the Lord thy God, Thou shalt have no god before me," or the like. The Hebrew god has been revamped by Christians; therefore it was said that American law is Christian law. "I will never deny the God upon whom our laws and country depend," said the Alabama chief justice. At the time of this ...