Thursday, August 28, 2003

Moore or Less

For those of you who have been distracted by the crush of multifarous realities, Alabama state supreme court’s Chief Justice the hon. Roy Moore has a 2.5 ton statement to make.  Two years or so ago he caused to have erected a privately donated monument to the ten commandments in the rotunda of the State Supreme Court building.  His rationale was to recognize and pay homage to the basic judeo-christian moral framework upon which our society today has been crafted, as further described here.  Moore may be speaking for many Alabamians - he was popularly elected in a landslide, having already achieved some renown for his display of a carved wooden “ten commandments” plaque in his courtroom in a lower court.  The rotunda monument, however, was immediately criticized by liberals and libertarians, and the ACLU brought suit in federal court to have it removed.  That suit was ultimately successful and the 11th circuit USDC ordered the monument removed.  Judge Moore was suspended by the Alabama Board of Judicial Inquiry on August 25 for refusing to comply with that order.  He and his supporters are engaged in ongoing demonstrations, even as the monument was removed yesterday from the courthouse rotunda.

My extended rant on this subject continues below.

This matter raises many complex questions of jurisdiction and federal-state comity.  These are discussed far more thoroughly than I could hope to here.  I’m particularly pleased to point out this site because it is written by my old con law and legal theory professor, who is a very nice guy and an absolute genius with regard to constitutional issues. 

My point, or the one I feel compelled to make myself, anyway, concerns Judge Moore’s rationale - the idea that our society is founded on the moral precepts of biblical teachings.  I would readily admit that these religious codes are important to our society - as were Hammurabi’s (which predate the ten commandments by, in some estimates, about 1000 years), the Roman civil code, and Greek principles of ethics and social structure. But whatever.  None of these embody the principles on which this country was founded.  The founders looked to god, but not to the bible - the constitutional framers being notorious freethinkers.  Hence, the constitution contains no biblical quotes or references, and the first amendment thereto prohibits the state from supporting or impairing any religious institution. 

But let’s go back a bit further in our continental experience.  The framers wrote as they did because they sought to articulate the common sentiment of their constituency - a sentiment which emphasized the rule of law, natural freedoms, representation and respect.  These principles are in turn derived from the founding philosophies of the various original colonies - which were established when this continent was a haven for those facing religious or political persecution at home.  Puritans, Catholics, even Quakers found refuge here from heavy-handed hegemonies; here they could believe and worship as they saw fit without the intrusion of the state (in the person of the king) to correct or upbraid them.  Yes, many of those pioneers intollerantly denied these freedoms and liberties to others - but they were on the right track, and over time we have slowly learned to embrace these principles more and more firmly so that today even women and persons of african descent are considered fully human - and we (or I, anyway) have trouble conceiving of things any other way.  But our founders lived in a time of prejudice and oppression, and had to forge their new free world out of, and in spite of, millenia of historical tradition to the contrary.  They pointed us toward our goal and trusted us to stay the course.  It has taken us too long to get where we are, to turn back now. 

And I do consider Judge Moore’s intrasigent prosletyzing to be tantamont to turning back from hard-fought progress.  The worlds from which our ancestors historically escaped to this land overwhelmingly paid explicit homage to the ten commandments and the subordination of men to God - all of Europe and latin America fostered state-supported religion and integrated god into the affairs of men more intimately even than Judge Moore has proposed.  If that was what our forebears wanted, they’d have stayed where they were.  But they wanted freedom, so they came here.  Freedom has been hard to define and a damn long time coming, but now that we have a decent slice of it we must jealously guard against it’s being whittled away, even as we mobilize to increase our share.  Judge Moore, if that stone tablet really represents your law, you should not be a judge in this country.  We use different laws. Go somewhere where god is not decreed forever to be separated from the state, and leave this country to those who continue to honor its founding values: Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

And let us not overlook the fact, which I rarely see discussed, that there are several different versions of the ten commandments.  When Judge Moore chose “his” version of the ten commandments, he was not honoring a judeo-christian heritage - he was advancing his own version (or King James’) of “holy writ” over and against those of his neighbors who read different versions.  His sanctimony is most troublesome because it is, even on its face, without premise or principle - he excludes millions of his supposed “brothers” with his egocentric belief that the stone tablets are monoliths, when they are in fact significantly various.  And if there is such variation even in the supposedly immutable word of god, how can he claim the superiority of one version without dishonoring the faiths and traditions that follow the others?  Or don’t they count?  Or are they simply wrong?  Evil?  Damned?  Or are the others right, and Judge Moore is the one facing the brimstone?  I don’t know who, if anyone, is actually “right” in this aspect of the controversy - but I do gravely distrust anyone who claims to be.