Using religion for government purposes

[Mark Graber]

One should also note in this respect that many Jews believe the proper translation is "Ten Statements."

>>> Douglas Laycock <laycockd at umich.edu> 03/30/09 6:57 PM >>>


There were real disputes before we get to Summum.  Scalia's opinion in Van Orden reminds me of the Colbert interview with the Congressman who was sponsoring a Ten Commandments bill but couldn't name more than one or two Commandments.  The fact that many people on both sides of this debate are uninformed doesn't mean there is no real disagreement or that no one knows about it. 

A friend of mine who is devout (but not remotely fanatic, for those who might overread "devout"), and who is generally sympathetic to government promotion of religion and skeptical of my resistance, actually looked at the Texas monument for the first time during the Van Orden litigation.  And her immediate reaction was, "They've got an extra commandment in there."  And so they did, from her perspective.  No graven images is not a separate commandment for Catholics, and that is no accident.  Catholic churches are full of images (of course those images are not worshiped, but the Protestant version of the Commandments forbids the making as well as the worshiping).  The iconoclasts in the Reformation destroyed the images in the Catholic churches whenever they got the chance, and many Protestant churches still today have little or no art and a bare cross.  And some Muslims go much further and say no artistic depictions of any living thing.  So did the Protestant plaintiff in the 1980s case from Nebraska about whether she could have a driver's license without a picture.  But icons are central to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. 

This is no insignificant disagreement; this is deep in the practice and imagination of large branches of Western Christianity, let alone the whole range of monotheistic faiths.  And the city posts one version or the other version; it either forbids the making of graven images or it doesn't.  It never posts all the different versions, and of course it never nods to the people who reject all the versions. 

It was obvious in Van Orden that a government that posts religious messages would post only some religious messages and not others -- that it would choose and play favorites, and that it already had.  Summum (the case) drives the point home.  But for people inclined to dismiss Summum (the religion) as small and weird, we already  let government reject the Commandments of much larger faiths in Van Orden itself. 

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