U.S. judge orders removal of Ten Commandments from Kentucky public buildings


18 May 2000 (Newsroom) — A U.S. federal court in Kentucky has ordered state officials to remove wall displays that include the Ten Commandments from classrooms in a public school district and two county courthouses. Judge Jennifer B. Coffman issued three nearly identical preliminary injunctions on May 5, arguing that the wall displays amounted to government endorsement of a particular religion, in conflict with the First Amendment.

Officials in Harlan, McCreary, and Pulaski counties assembled the displays after a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Kentucky last November challenged the posting of the Ten Commandments by itself. In an attempt to comply with the law, officials added historical documents reflecting the country’s Judeo-Christian heritage. The documents included the Mayflower Compact, the national motto “In God We Trust,” the preamble to the Kentucky Constitution, an excerpt from the Declaration of Independence, a proclamation issued by President Ronald Reagan declaring 1983 the Year of the Bible, and an 1863 proclamation by President Abraham Lincoln designating a National Day of Prayer and Humiliation.

The defendants, contending that the documents now on display are historical, have filed motions to stay the injunctions with both the U.S. District Court and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, Ohio. In the Harlan County schools, the Ten Commandments appear as printed in the Congressional Record.

“These documents speak for themselves,” argues defense lawyer Colonel Ronald D. Ray, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense under President Ronald Reagan. “You can’t call the Congressional Record a religious document. That flies in the face of the Constitution, which provides for the Congressional Record. This is censorship of the permanent and official history of American civil government.”

One of Judge Coffman’s orders states, however, that “each and every document (in the displays) refers to religion. Several have been edited to include only their religious references. Indeed, the only unifying element among the documents is their reference to God, the Bible, or religion.”

For the time being, the displays continue to hang on the walls of public buildings in the three eastern Kentucky counties. “Before I personally take them down I will resign my office or go to jail,” professes McCreary County Judge-Executive Jimmie W. Greene, who has served in his current capacity intermittently since 1978. “I respect the law, but this would be one order I would have to disobey.”

Greene says he draws encouragement from Alabama Judge Roy Moore, who caught the nation’s attention in the mid-1990s when he battled legal challenges to remove the Ten Commandments from his courtroom wall. In the past year a Ten Commandments movement has gathered steam, particularly since the shootings at Columbine High School in April 1999. “For at least a decade, a large percentage of the American public has been restless over the idea that there are no moral anchors in our society, that we’ve abandoned our moral absolutes, that we’ve sold out to moral relativism,” explains the Rev. Robert Schenck, whose Washington, D.C.-based National Clergy Council launched a Ten Commandments Project in 1995 to stimulate dialogue about moral issues. “But the flame was Columbine. There we saw what we thought our culture was incapable of. … It was a terrifying wake-up call in our culture.”

Since the Columbine incident, a movement has grown “spontaneously and without central control,” says Schenck. Last summer, the U.S. House of Representatives by a wide margin added an amendment to a juvenile justice resolution granting power to the states to display the Ten Commandments in public buildings. In the wake of the House’s action, Indiana, South Dakota, and Kentucky have passed legislation permitting the posting of the Commandments, and nine other states are considering similar moves.

Last October, the Family Research Council (FRC) introduced an initiative called “Hang Ten,” presenting Congress members with framed copies of the Ten Commandments for display in their offices. The Washington, D.C.-based organization also has distributed more than half a million Ten Commandments book covers for students and plans to focus attention on bolstering the movement at the state level, according to FRC chief spokesperson Janet Parshall. “This is a cultural and historical moment in America,” she observes. “It is the intersection of a cultural pain with a practical solution.”

Parshall believes that the Ten Commandments can be seen as remedial in that they provoke thought and conversation about the “right and wrong way to behave.” “Not only do the Commandments describe appropriate behavior, but they are present in American law,” she argues. “Don’t pretend they’re not out there because when students get out of school, the law will meet them where they are.”

In contrast, Robert Boston, assistant director of communications for Americans United for Separation of Church and State in Washington, D.C., describes the Ten Commandments movement as a “Christian fundamentalist fad running out of gas.” Boston says he expects lawsuits challenging the legislation recently passed in Indiana, South Dakota, and Kentucky will “put a stop to it.”

Just weeks before Judge Coffman’s injunctions, Kentucky Governor Paul E. Patton, a Democrat, signed a resolution that permits the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public buildings “when incorporated into an historical display.” The bill also mandates that a monument inscribed with the Ten Commandments be restored to the capitol grounds as part of an “historical and cultural display.”

The Kentucky ACLU plans to file suit over the monument portion of the resolution, but dismisses the other part as “meaningless, feel-good legislation,” since it is not compulsory. “For that portion, we wouldn’t challenge the legislation itself; we’d challenge the posting,” says Kentucky ACLU general counsel David Friedman. “If a school posts the Ten Commandments in a lawful way, it doesn’t need the legislation.”

Yet what constitutes a “lawful way” in which to exhibit the Ten Commandments remains unclear, says Charles Haynes, senior scholar at Freedom Forum’s First Amendment Center in Nashville, Tennessee. Whether the courts will allow the Commandments to be posted as part of a larger display “in part may depend on what the display is,” he says. “In the Kentucky cases, you have the Commandments placed among civic documents, but the documents are favorable in promoting religion. That’s what did the Commandments in at this level; whether that will do them in at the Supreme Court level is a harder question.”

In 1980, the Supreme Court struck down a Kentucky statute mandating that the Ten Commandments be posted in public schools. The court argued in Stone v. Graham that “the Ten Commandments are undeniably a sacred text,” but allowed for the Commandments to be “integrated into the school curriculum, where the Bible may constitutionally be used in an appropriate study of history, civilization, ethics, comparative religion, or the like.”

The states, Haynes points out, are aiming to craft legislation that will hold under Stone by emphasizing the context in which the Commandments may be displayed. “This is why the recent cases in Kentucky are significant,” he argues. “It indicates that the courts may not buy that.”

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