Supreme Court muddies the Ten Commandments waters
There is a surplus of overheated rhetoric regarding the Supreme Court’s decisions on Monday in the two Ten Commandments cases (Van Orden v. Perry and McCreary County v. ACLU), including Scalia’s own remark about “this court's hostility to religion.” From the seemingly opposed decisions, the Supreme Court has apparently tried to strike a balance between the Constitutional “wall of separation” principle and the desires of many citizens to have that wall the eroded to promote their religion. I would have preferred a pair of unequivocal decisions, but I understand the Court’s desire to split the difference; the judiciary is already under attack from the wingnuts for alleged “judicial activism.”
David Batstone’s “The Supreme Court got it right on religion” at Sojourner has a religious but very even-handed (i.e., not paranoid) assessment:
The key question in each case hinged on whether the display of religious monuments violates the First Amendment's prohibition against an official "establishment" of religion. The state, in other words, cannot identify itself with a particular religion. American legal tradition thereby protects the integrity of citizens to pursue their own religious traditions without the interference of the state. […] In sum, the intention of the Court's decision was to undergird the free expression of religion, yet prevent the association of the state with a sole religion.
As a secularist, I object to Batstone’s allegation that we think “people of faith should keep their religious sentiments hidden away in the privacy of a closet in their home.” Secularists aren’t demanding that anyone’s religion be hidden, merely that it shouldn’t be endorsed by our government or financed by our tax dollars.
Is that really so hard to understand?