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[bryant]

On the other hand, Scalia's further comments on the display of the Ten Commandments are wrongheaded. His appeal to majority opinion is not only Constitutionally unsound -- there is no question that the Constitution establishes the country and the laws thereof based upon the consent of the governed, and a strict constructionalist should not assert that the Constitution and our laws are derived from God -- but poorly argued. He says "The minority should be tolerant of the majority expressing its belief that this government comes from God." Perhaps so, but the government is not an instrument to express majority views. The majority of the country voted Republican in this last election; that does not mean the government is empowered to place displays extolling the virtues of the Republican Party in courthouses.

And it surprises me, really, that such a profoundly intelligent man could be so casual about ignorance: "probably 90 percent of the American people believe in the Ten Commandments and 85 percent couldn't tell you what the ten are." But perhaps it's contempt for the groundlings.

Comments

[tayefeth.livejournal.com]

it surprises me, really, that such a profoundly intelligent man could be so casual about ignorance

It surprises me that an allegedly intelligent person can claim that people believe in something they don't know.

[telepresence.livejournal.com]

I dunno. I think that's pretty common. A sort of vague, uninformed belief or reliance on a concept or process or philosophy or document without any real specific knowledge or understanding of it.

I mean, I assume most Americans believe in the Constitution, but I reckon a frightening percentage of them would confuse a snippet of its actual text with that of say, the Declaration of Independence. And I bet the dropoff of awareness of the Amendments drops like a rock after the first 2.

And truly, I'd bet that most people are guitly of that for some subject or range of subjects, I think most humans probably do at least a little handwaving.

[kodi]

It would be nice if Scalia had spelled out for us the difference between a "government that derives its authority from God" and an "establishment of religion."

[chrislehrich.livejournal.com]

I must say that I find much of the debate (not this one here, but in the Court) fundamentally silly. Scalia's argument is historically unsound and certainly violates his claims to Constructionist positions. The idea that somehow putting the Decalogue in a museum solves everything is peculiar; does that not make a statement about religion and its position? Surely that is what the Court is supposed to be ruling on in the first place?

More deeply, I find it very odd that everyone considers the Decalogue a fundamentally Christian expression. Really? Not, hypothetically, Jewish, perchance?

Consider the contents, in one worthwhile translation:

1 And God spoke all these words, saying, 2 "I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
3 "You shall have no other gods before me.
4 "You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; 5 you shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.
7 "You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.
8 "Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor, and do all your work; 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God; in it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your manservant, or your maidservant, or your cattle, or the sojourner who is within your gates; 11 for in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.
12 "Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which the LORD your God gives you.
13 "You shall not kill.
14 "You shall not commit adultery.
15 "You shall not steal.
16 "You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
17 "You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his manservant, or his maidservant, or his ox, or his ass, or anything that is your neighbor's."

And then of course there's all the variations, for which see http://www.levendwater.org/companion/append39.html (for example).

Now tell me that the monument they want to put up includes every word, every "jot and tittle" as Jesus put it (in the KJ translation), of that passage of Exodus. Don't you rather doubt that it includes all that stuff about "I am a jealous God"? I know I do; I'm betting it's a stripped down version to cover "what's really important." I think the demand here ought to be this: if you're going to put it up, you must put it up in the exact original words, in Hebrew, with a near-as-dammit literal English translation if any translation at all is provided. You may not interpret this in the construction and then claim it as a foundation for law, because that does assert that the Decalogue is only a foundation of US law in some particular denominational or sectarian interpretation. Surely the court would be treating this differently if it were phrased, "May we put up a monument about the legal principles of Methodism, which Baptists and Lutherans and Catholics all find an offensive distortion of the word of God?"

Scalia's dismissal of this issue is not a matter of his intelligence. It's a matter of his dishonesty.

[bryant]

Yes. As I mentioned, from the pictures I've seen I think that Roy Moore's Ten Commandments monument used the Roman Catholic version of the text. This is probably fairly common for such monuments, as it's significantly more concise. I find that rather ironic given the way Moore's religious ancestors felt about Papists.