Ten Commandments down to Six for public display?
By Joseph DeCaro, Worthy News Correspondent
WASHINGTON, D.C. (Worthy News)– A federal judge in Virginia proposed that a dispute over the display of the Ten Commandments at a public high school be resolved by removing the four Commandments that mention God.
“If indeed this issue is not about God,” said U.S. District Judge Michael Urbanski during mediation, “why wouldn’t it make sense for Giles County to say, ‘Let’s go back and just post the bottom six?'”
The American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia had filed suit against Giles County’s display of the Ten Commandments at Narrows High School, arguing that it violated the First Amendment’s protection against the endorsement of religion; the school board argued that the Commandments were part of a display of historical documents and therefore not religious.
Although the Commandments were previously removed from the school, the school board voted 3-2 last summer to reinstall them.
“One could argue that the policy of displaying the Ten Commandments is not violative of the ‘establishment’ clause as long as other religions’ equivalents of the Ten Commandments are afforded an equal opportunity to be displayed,” said blogger JRC. “The ACLU evidently has adopted an ‘exclusionary’ interpretation of the establishment clause whereby the First Amendment forbids any and all government trafficking in religion …”
In fact, the U.S. military’s Chaplains Corps was unsuccessfully challenged in court to be in violation of the establishment clause — “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” — since U.S. personnel serving in lands where the practice of their religion was not available, or even prohibited, required that the government provide religious services.