WHY SHOULD WE DISPLAY THE TEN COMMANDMENTS?
By Tom Taylor
The five-thousand-pound granite monument to the Ten Commandments, installed by Chief Justice Roy
Moore in the lobby of his Alabama courthouse, is there no longer. Federal judges, concerned it might
traumatize a passing atheist, have ordered it hidden away in a back room. So now America’s tolerance and
diversity are safe once again – or is it more likely our federal judicial masters, in their on-going destruction of
the religious foundations of American law, are jeopardizing the rights and liberties of us all, “diverse” or
otherwise?
Do federal judges today ever wonder why the exterior of the U. S. Supreme Court building bears a huge
carving of Moses holding the Ten Commandments? Surely they are aware at the time America was founded,
as historian Terry Eastland has written, “most people agreed that our law was rooted, as John Adams said,
in a common moral and religious tradition… that stretched back to the time Moses went up on Mount Sinai”
(where he received the Ten Commandments.) Surely they have read the famed Jurist Joseph Story who
wrote in 1829, “There has never been a period in which Common Law did not recognize Christianity as
laying at its foundation.”
But, say the secular humanists, we are a secular nation and only two of the Commandments (Thou shall
not kill and Thou shall not steal) have any bearing on secular law. But I believe a deeper look will show all
the Commandments are relevant. Those dealing with human relationships are the ground rules for a
civilized society. They protect the family and the powerless and weak among us. Those dealing with man’s
relationship to God serve, in our secular society, to emphasize the supremacy of God, the lawgiver.
As strange as it may sound to liberal humanist ears, the concept of the supremacy of God is vital to
American liberty. Thomas Jefferson wrote the God who created mankind endowed him with “certain
inalienable rights,” life, and liberty. If this God is only imaginary, then our rights and liberty are equally
imaginary. They exist only at the whim of governing officials.
But if the Creator God, recognized for 1000 years by Western Law, is real, then our rights and liberties
are also real and are indeed “inalienable.”
How wonderful it would be if, in every courtroom in America, someone on trial for robbery or fraud would
have to pass by the Commandments “Thou shall not covet and Thou shall not steal.” How wonderful if every
lawyer and prosecutor would daily confront “Thou shall not bear false witness.”
How doubly wonderful if every federal judge would daily confront the Commandments – all ten of them –
and be reminded our law and liberty originated with a power far above his own personal opinions and ego.