The 10 Commandments Case

Trying to recover from a bad night of high winds and trying to keep a wood fire going, I blearily turned on C-SPAN this a.m. to catch Kelly Shackleford, a lawyer with the Texas-based Liberty Legal Institute, and the Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, debate each other about the Ten Commandments cases being heard today in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Lynn pretty much ate Shackleford's lunch and clearly has constitutional precedent on his side. But it doesn't matter, and I find myself wishing him off TV, along with the good atheist dad in California who wants "under God" out of the Pledge of Allegiance and all the other activists for separation of church and state currently sniffing out the odd granite monument to Yahweh on public property. Could you all just be quiet?

What you're doing, see, is handing the Religious Right its justification for proclaiming loudly that there's a war on religion in this country. Their particular brand of Christianity needs proof of persecution to get out of bed in the morning, and you're giving 'em proof. Nonsensical as it is.

See, I grew up in West Texas at a time when we had (Baptist) devotionals every morning in school, broadcast into every classroom. At every football and basketball game, a Baptist preacher stood up and prayed for Almighty God to smite the opposing team, if He found it favorable to do so, and I was in church three times a week without fail, and we were PREACHED AT as kids on a daily basis. We prayed before every meal, we prayed before going to bed, we prayed when we saw a black cloud approaching from the southwest. And look how I turned out.

None of that preachin' and prayin' did me any harm. And it was only its utter commonplace presence in all of life that eventually allowed me to notice other ideas and possibilities. Get it? Allow it to become commonplace, and it also becomes weak.

If someone had come in and said no more daily devotions in school, it would have inflamed a situation that was already producing its fair share of atheists and agnostics just by MANDATING religiosity as the commonplace order of the day.

I don't mind saying "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, and it has nothing much to do with my own ethics, which are strong. I don't mind having "In God We Trust" on my legal tender when I buy my pinko, Commie books or go to see godless Hollywood products. I can step around the biggest granite memorial to the Ten Commandments that any tin-horn county or state official wants to install on public property. (Don't get me wrong: I'm glad that Roy Moore, the loony former Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, lost his job, since I'm constitutionally protected from a nut handing down the law.)

What I can't deal with is 50+ percent of Americans believing the myth that unless they can have those granite monuments impeding traffic on public property they're somehow being persecuted for religion's sake and hence must vote for the party which promises to cast the poor and the old out onto their own devices, while squeezing working people for less pay. And -- oh yes -- starting foreign wars on false pretenses because God told the president it was all right.

I can't deal with that at all.