c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Faced with not one but two opportunities this week to settle a crucial issue of religious liberties, the U.S. Supreme Court justices instead used a concept called “legal realism.” Simply put, they changed the law to make it say what they wanted it to say.

The justices should have stood with the Founding Fathers, who clearly intended for a sovereign God to be acknowledged in government. Instead, the message from McCreary County v. ACLU and Van Orden v. Perry goes something like this: Religious symbols and documents are acceptable on public property only when all the religious significance is drained from them. Otherwise, forget it.

In both of these cases, displays of the Ten Commandments were at issue. In McCreary the justices declared that the commandments couldn’t appear inside county courthouses. But in Van Orden, they decreed that a public monument with the commandments inscribed passed constitutional muster, as long as it was part of a tribute to the influences on our legal system.

It’s clear that the U.S. Supreme Court is officially hostile to religion. The only question is how hostile. And the court itself doesn’t seem to know the answer to that question. It’s particularly maddening that in each of these cases, advocates of the Ten Commandments displays argued that their displays didn’t acknowledge God, but only presented the Ten Commandments in a legal and historical context.

Lawyers defending the Texas monument, for example, stressed that it was one of 17 monuments on the grounds; that it was surrounded by five other, larger monuments; and that it was essentially a historical relic rather than a governmental suggestion that men praise God. In other words, the state took great pains to keep the Ten Commandments from offending anyone. But that shouldn’t be the standard for judicial decisions. Their judgment should be according to the rule of law.

To have the court accept this argument but reject the similar approach argued in McCreary is confusing at best, and it doesn’t bode well for those of us who understand our country’s Christian heritage.

Earlier this year Judge Roy Moore, the brilliant and courageous former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, framed the issue perfectly for a group of 1,000 pastors whom I hosted. Judge Moore was removed from office because he commissioned and installed a monument to the Ten Commandments in the building where his court conducted its business. The issue in his case, and in the cases the court ruled on this week, was simple: “Can the state acknowledge God?”

I believe the U.S. Supreme Court wouldn’t hear Judge Moore’s case because it presented the issue of religious liberties clearly and without apology. Instead, the court accepted two cases in which lawyers tried to convince the justices that the Ten Commandments were not what they plainly are _ our nation’s original source of law.

The Founding Fathers would find it unthinkable that we would even ask if it was proper for the state to acknowledge God. The first leaders of our government had no intention of creating the secular state that liberals would have us believe we live in. On the contrary, the Founding Fathers called the nation to prayer and fasting and funded missionaries to the Indians.

The justices referred to the concept of separation of church and state in their opinions, but they used a definition that twists the Founding Fathers’ intent. Our Founding Fathers created the First Amendment to protect citizens from the evils of a state-run church; instead, today’s secularists use it to deny God’s authority over the nation.

Like most people _ 76 percent of Americans, by one recent poll _ I believe the public display of the Ten Commandments is a permissible and essential acknowledgment of God. And it angers me when judges rely on a mistaken interpretation of the First Amendment to tell me my faith is unacceptable for display in our halls of justice.

At least these decisions will show the nation again the importance of nominating and confirming judges who will respect the role of the judiciary in our system of government. It’s absolutely essential that our government populate the federal courts with judges who refuse to substitute their own biases and opinions for the laws they are sworn to interpret.

Until we do, judges will continue to strip us of our God-given freedoms, until the word “freedom” itself has very little meaning.

MO/PH END RNS

(Rod Parsley is the senior pastor of World Harvest Church in Columbus, Ohio. He also is the president and founder of the Center for Moral Clarity, a Christian grass-roots organization, and author of the newly released book “Silent No More.”)

Editors: Search the RNS photo Web site at https://religionnews.com for photos of Parsley and Ten Commandments displays to accompany this story.