Bill promotes religion

By Staff Reports

State lawmakers are involved in another attempt to display the Ten Commandments in public buildings. This effort is just as pointless and unconstitutional as past attempts.

The bill, which was approved by the House last year, was taken up by a Senate panel last week. Under the bill, the Judeo-Christian cornerstone could be displayed in public schools and courthouses in the state as long as it is posted along with a dozen documents that allegedly influenced U.S. law and government.

Those documents include the Constitution, Pledge of Allegiance and Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.

"We think little schoolchildren passing this in courthouses and schools will have a very good understanding of the breadth of how we got where we are in America and South Carolina from Moses to the present," said Oran Smith, president of the Palmetto Family Council, a group with close ties to the conservative evangelical group, Focus on the Family.

The inclusion of historical documents is part of a strategy to portray displays of the Ten Commandments as a prop in a history lesson. In an earlier failed attempt to allow such displays in the Statehouse, South Carolina lawmakers proposed that the commandments be posted next to copies of the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

Thomas Crocker, a constitutional law expert a the University of South Carolina School of Law, told senators last week that he believes the purpose of the display is to endorse religion, which is unconstitutional. Crocker noted that of the 12 proposed documents on display, five have nothing at all to do with the law or American constitutional law, including King's "Dream" speech, the national and state pledges, the national motto "In God We Trust" and the national anthem.

In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Ten Commandments taken down from Kentucky public school classrooms, calling them an unconstitutional breach of the separation of church and state. In a 2005 case, this one involving displays of the Ten Commandments in two rural Kentucky courthouses, the majority again found that the displays served the unconstitutional purpose of promoting one religion over another while serving no genuine secular purpose.

Supporters of the South Carolina bill hope to avoid a constitutional challenge by claiming that the displays they propose are historical rather than religious. We're not promoting religion, they say, we're mrerly showing the evolution of the rule of law.

But the premise is flimsy. Why, for example, include the Ten Commandments and not Hammurabi's Code?

We might be more receptive of this proposal if we thought that posting the Ten Commandments would, by some process of osmosis, make schoolchildren and criminals more likely to uphold them. We don't think it works that way.

Approving this display inevitably would invite a long, expensive and ultimately futile legal battle. Instead of engaging in demagoguery about the value of posting the Ten Commandments in schools, lawmakers ought to be looking for ways to repair or replace the many overcrowded, crumbling schools children are forced to attend in the poorer parts of this state.