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[bryant]

Above the main door of the Cambridge City Hall is a stone bearing these words: bq. God has given Commandments unto Men. From these Commandments Men have framed Laws by which to be governed. It is honorable and praiseworthy to faithfully serve the people by helping to administer these Laws. If the Laws are not enforced, the People are not well governed. The asserted motivation behind "Roy Moore's monument to the 10 Commandments":http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/1103/13mooreverdict.html was acknowledgement of the law's moral foundation: namely, the Commandments inscribed on his monument, which are certainly the Commandments referenced in the inscription above. To the best of my knowledge, there's been no national outrage about the Cambridge City Hall. One senses a slight dichotomy here. I think, however, the dichotomy involves the real reasons why Moore's actions are repugnant. It's not that Moore's trying to set religion above the law, because that's not his real motivation. It's that Moore is a selfish, greedy, power-motivated man who doesn't particularly care about God. He cares about using the belief of others to advance his own career. He's no kind of Christian. It's a bad move to allow people of Moore's ilk to cast this as a fight between atheists and God. You can't give someone a free ride just because they claim to be religious. The dichotomy only exists if we ignore Moore's motivations and let him get away with framing the terms of the argument.

Comments

[gentlyepigrams]

This is an issue that reminds me very much of Confederate monuments on various public grounds throughout the South. I'm appalled when people fly Confederate flags over them (seen it in the last couple of years) and would rabidly froth at the idea of new monuments today. At the same time, I'm not comfortable with the idea of knocking them all down or moving them all into the basement.

In the same way, it seems to me that chiseling an inscription out of a 110-year-old building is just plain wrong, even if the inscription annoys the snot out of me and I think it's wrong on the history.