High Court Gives Split Decisions On Ten Commandments(Kentucky bad, Texas okay)

AP ^ | 06/27/05 | AP

[arasina]

ewwww...you're in for it, Buster. (or should that be, Buster, SIR?)

Now I say we quit highjacking this thread and go for a little walk on the beach. Comin' with me?

[jos65]

Please,Please someone tell me exactly what is wrong with the following:

Ten Commandments

1) You shall have no other gods before me.
2) You shall make no graven image.
3) Do not take the Lord's name in vain.
4) Observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy.
5) Honor your father and your mother.
6) Do not kill.
7) Do not commit adultery.
8) Do not steal.
9) Do not bear false witness (do not lie).
10) Do not covet your neighbor's wife, nor his donkey, nor anything that is his.

[arasina]

They are not just commandments, but promises. (Think about it.)

[jos65]

Please enlighten me as to what is wrong with these words?

TEN COMMANDMENTS


1) You shall have no other gods before me.
2) You shall make no graven image.
3) Do not take the Lord's name in vain.
4) Observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy.
5) Honor your father and your mother.
6) Do not kill.
7) Do not commit adultery.
8) Do not steal.
9) Do not bear false witness (do not lie).
10) Do not covet your neighbor's wife, nor his donkey, nor anything that is his.

[onyx]

Oh heck, I already call you Sir. You'll have to think of something else to make me do...lol.

[ArmyBratproud]

At least we get to keep them in Texas.

Still.....it ticks me off. They are still putting a limitation on how they can be displayed (see Ketucky case).

Which means they are limiting free speech. Not to mention the fact that the Federal courts have no business in this issue.

The 1st and 10th indicate that it is left up to the states.
And there is not violation of the 14th.....Since there is no state order to follow anything. And the 14th says nothing about exhibiting religion.

All that there is left to say is......."May WE crap on this non honorable court"

[Lancey Howard]

Thank you for your kind reply.

The Supreme Court has a schizophrenic approach to the first amendment and it is an approach rooted in hypocrisy, incompetence and cowardice. This becomes clear as you study the gymnastics and cartwheels that the Court has performed over the past 45 years in its desire to, again and again, broaden the "establishment clause" while during the same time offering only the occasional disdainful sneer at the "free exercise" clause as if it was the redheaded stepchild of the First Amendment.

It's all in the template: "establishment clause" - - benefit of every doubt; "free exercise clause" - - careful now! And since the expansion of the "establishment clause" has as its primary effect the shrinking of the "free exercise" clause, the favoritism of the Court - - 5 to 4, anyway - - is patently obvious

The difference in the way those two clauses of the First Amendment are treated by the Supreme Court tells you all you need to know about the cowardly scumbags who have occupied that Court for the past 50 years. Wasn't it fitting that that sissy Souter wrote the "majority opinion"? He is probably the biggest scumbag of them all. Mommy's boy.

Regards,
LH

[Mo1]

Not only was this an asinine decision because it makes no sense .. it's ok in one state but not in another?

But ... The USSC FAILED to follow the United States Constitution which they swore under oath to uphold

[inquest]

Historically, this has been interpreted as the US government being prohibited from treating one religion more favorably than another, as this would create an "establishment" where congress could de-facto declare the US a Christian state, where other religions were allowed but not treated equally.

"Historically", maybe, if you only go back to about the 1960s. Prior to that, it was understood that the establishment clause merely prohibited government from setting up an actual church organization, or favoring such a sect with special privileges for its members. That's completely different from simply expressing a belief. No Founder ever stated that that was to be prohibited.

[Lancey Howard]

Here is a related column. The ongoing thread is HERE.

Holy Moses - (SCOTUS 10 Commandments decisions; imagine our Founders knowing THIS!)
AMERICAN SPECTATOR.ORG ^ | JUNE 28, 2005 | GEORGE NEUMAYR, Executive Editor

Perhaps nothing illustrates this era of judicial lawlessness better than the Supreme Court's ruling yesterday that the Ten Commandments, unless they are somehow aesthetically muted and secularized, be chiseled off courthouses across the country. Lawless judges cannot abide the sight of fixed laws adorning courts.

Imagine if the representatives of the states at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 had a chance to review David Souter's secularized understanding of the First Amendment before deciding whether or not to ratify the Constitution. Would any of the states have ratified it? Would they have agreed to a constitution that gave federal judges the power to confiscate their public displays of the Ten Commandments?

No, not a single state would have ratified a constitution that gave the federal government the power to establish a de facto secular, lowest-common-denominator national religion that could swoop down and squash their local religious expressions. The whole purpose of the First Amendment was to create a wall not between the state and religion but between the federal government and state religious activity.

A historical fact almost no one ever mentions, which exposes Souter's understanding of the First Amendment as baldly unconstitutional, is that several states -- Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire -- still had their own religions after the U.S. Constitution was ratified.

And "in most of the other states," as author M. Stanton Evans wrote in the Washington Times in 1995, "there remained a network of religious requirements for public office -- typically, that one be a professing Christian of orthodox persuasion. Such requirements existed in New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Georgia and the Carolinas. For example, the state of Vermont, one of the more liberal states of the era (admitted to the Union in 1791) required the following oath of office: 'I do believe in one God, the Creator and Governor of the Universe, the rewarder of the good and the punisher of the wicked. And I do acknowledge the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be given by divine inspiration and own and profess the Protestant religion.'"

So let's add this up: in the 18th century, the states enjoying the protections of the First Amendment could have their own state religions if they wanted, could institute religious tests for public office, and could pass laws against blasphemy and Sabbath-avoidance, among other offenses; in 2005, the states can't even put up the Ten Commandments in courthouses without aesthetic permission from the Supreme Court. (If states make sure to secularize their Moses and signal to viewers that they don't really believe in the Ten Commandments, then, maybe, you can hang them, the Supreme Court told the states.)

Monday's ruling is yet another dismal reminder that the Supreme Court has written a new constitution for America without bothering to hold a Constitutional Convention. In fact, the Supreme Court should be renamed the "Ongoing Constitutional Convention." That's what it is at this point: nine judges determining from day to day the form of government under which over 280 million people will live. Liberals prefer this de facto Constitutional Convention to a real one since calling together the states to ratify a new secularist constitution would be a real hassle. They wouldn't dare be that direct and honest, for if they said to the American people, "The Founding Fathers' constitution is an outmoded theistic relic. Join us in forming a new constitution on secularist foundations," the people would never ratify it. So what do they do? They write a new constitution in David Souter's office and call it jurisprudence.

Souter, who held that the Ten Commandments in Kentucky courthouses could hurt someone's feelings (it is a constitutional no-no to make atheists feel like "outsiders," he says), made much of "neutrality" as a handy new principle. This is one of the grand-sounding conceits of secularism, and it is completely bogus. Just as the middle distance between truth and error is still error, so too the supposedly neutral and middle distance between religion and irreligion is still irreligion.

There are plenty of irreligious displays in courthouses -- depictions of this or that feel-good figure from mythology. Has the "neutral" Supreme Court ever asked that those displays be dismantled? Has it ever said to flaky judges in California, "We find your exhibitions to be dangerous endorsements of paganism that could make Christians feel like outsiders"?

Under the sham principle of neutrality, the lowest common denominator of the culture gets to define the public square while the very theism that informed the country's founding is declared criminal. The lawless judges of the Supreme Court can't bear any laws above them, whether they come from Madison or Moses.

George Neumayr is executive editor of The American Spectator.

[GoLightly]

I believe it is because of the way the cases were argued & what was in their briefs.

[jos65]

My friend:

They are not just commandments, but promises. (Think about it.)



I have thought about it for many,many years. 71 to be exact.
Living with the Ten Commandments,my family has done very well thank you.
You have to stand for something,or you will stand for anything.

God Bless

[inquest]

Imagine if the representatives of the states at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 had a chance to review David Souter's secularized understanding of the First Amendment before deciding whether or not to ratify the Constitution. Would any of the states have ratified it? Would they have agreed to a constitution that gave federal judges the power to confiscate their public displays of the Ten Commandments? No, not a single state would have ratified a constitution that gave the federal government the power to establish a de facto secular, lowest-common-denominator national religion that could swoop down and squash their local religious expressions.

What the author of this piece needs to look at is not the 1st amendment, but the 14th. Even SCOTUS agrees that the 1st amendment did not initially apply to the states. It's only, they claim, through the 14th amendment that it's so applied. But ultimately their reasoning is still bogus. The same general analysis provided in the paragraph above still would have been applicable in this case: The states would not have ratified the 14th amendment if they thought it gave the federal government the power to seize plaques of the Ten Commandments on public property.