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[bryant]

Helpful hint to the legions of Democratic strategists who read this (I hear I've got a huge following in -- no, wait, that was my stomach rumbling):

When Scalia says that there's no material difference between legislative proclamations invoking God's name and putting up the Ten Commandments, he's (intentionally or not) setting up a trap. He's absolutely correct, too. I've written about this before; Cambridge City Hall has a keystone which explains that the Commandments are the source of the law and which is just as religious as anything Roy Moore did.

So if you say "Yes, thus those legislative proclamations should be banned as well," you wind up pissing off people who are serious about their Christianity. Should they be pissed off? Enh, it's a fruitless argument. What is true is that they will be, and once again the Democrats wind up getting framed as the anti-religion party.

On the other hand, if we instead say "There's nothing wrong with paying our respects to religion in the public space," and start lobbying for Islamic, Jewish, and Buddhist images and writings to go side by side with the expressions of Christian religion -- you still piss some people off, but you put those people in the position of having to be the ones who say "No." Nobody likes a nay-sayer. "Geeze, buddy, you got something against Buddhist pacifists?"

Heck, start smaller. I think that Roy Moore used the Catholic Ten Commandments, but that seems a little biased. I think if we're going to put the Ten Commandments up, we should try to put up multiple versions. Hopefully we can respect Catholics as much as we respect Protestants.

I don't mean any of this ironically. I don't think a little religion in a public space is a bad thing. I think that religion in the service of greed and personal power is a bad thing, and it's important to figure out what it is we're worried about before running off and protesting everything.

Comments

[kirbyk.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I pretty much agree. A lot of life is picking your battles, and this isn't it.

I read in some article somewhere that in one of the Ten Commandment places, in response to criticism they also hung up a copy of the Declaration of Independance and the Magna Carta. That totally rocks. As an atheist, I'm totally confortable with the idea that our laws flow largely from those three documents, plus the (too large to frame nicely) Constitution. Good compromise.

We need to draw a line, but one should draw lines in such a way so that most people are on your side of it, and in this case they're just not. And it's not that big a deal.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, if we instead say "There's nothing wrong with paying our respects to religion in the public space," and start lobbying for Islamic, Jewish, and Buddhist images and writings to go side by side with the expressions of Christian religion -- you still piss some people off, but you put those people in the position of having to be the ones who say "No." Nobody likes a nay-sayer. "Geeze, buddy, you got something against Buddhist pacifists?"

Where feathers will start to fly is when the Wiccans demand their images and writings posted. Not to mention the Scientologists.

Which is not to say this isn't a road one should go down. I, for one, think it would be amusing to watch.

[lintra.livejournal.com]

Personally, I'm an earth worshipper, so I'd like a globe, a big globe, in front to the courthouse, because it represents the earth, where the laws were made.

[bryant]

Works by me. I'd rather like that.

[rfrancis]

I'm still trying to convince my fellow Christians that they aren't Jewish, and thus the Mosaic Law, including the Ten Commandments, wasn't for them anyway.

-R

Same here

[eyelessgame.livejournal.com]

I think I pissed off Mike Mittmann a few years ago by telling him I didn't think the republic was in as much danger from 'under God' being in the Pledge of Allegiance as it was from the people on both sides of the issue who felt it was a huge deal whether 'under God' was in the Pledge of Allegiance.

I feel the same way about these sorts of religious displays. I don't think my freedoms are damaged by nativity scenes or Ten Commandments displays -- though it's interesting how many of the 10C are so thoroughly orthogonal to American law and culture. (Forget about the first three obvious ones. If we took the 10th Commandment seriously, capitalism would largely fall apart... or at least our consumer culture would vanish.)

This nation was founded by a bunch of guys kicked out of their native countries for being too religiously extreme. Denying this part of our heritage -- even as we also celebrate the marvelous sleight-of-hand those wacky Deists put over on them later -- isn't really fair.