High Court Splits on 10 Commandments CasesJun 27, 2005 Fractured Opinions Leave Law in Shambles and Invite More Pointless Lawsuits Today, the Supreme Court issued its long-awaited decisions in the two 10 Commandments cases, Van Orden v. Perry and McCreary v. ACLU. The Court struck down the McCreary display in a 5-vote majority opinion by Justice Souter, but upheld the Perry display by a 4-vote plurality by Chief Justice Rehnquist, and a concurrence by Justice Breyer. "The separation of church and state does not mean the separation of everything remotely religious from everything remotely governmental," explains Jared Leland, Media and Legal Counsel of The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. "Even if such an extreme separation were desirable -- and it's not -- it would be impossible to implement, especially in a country where so many people are religious."
"Instead, governments are free to recognize and acknowledge the wide variety of religious influences on American culture. Governments routinely celebrate cultural diversity, and religious elements are unavoidably a part of that -- they shouldn't be singled out for special exclusion. Today's decision reaffirms this bedrock principle in one case, but then pays it only lip service in the other. And in the process, it adds more confusion to an already confused area of First Amendment law." The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty is an interfaith, non-partisan, public-interest law firm dedicated to protecting the free expression of all religious traditions. Because The Becket Fund supports the equal participation of religious people and viewpoints in public life, it filed separate amicus curiae (friend of the court) briefs in each case, one in Van Orden and one in McCreary. The briefs explained that governments inevitably and legitimately engage in cultural expression all the time (in the form of mottos, declarations, monuments, and other displays), and that those expressions inevitably and legitimately include diverse religious elements (including those acknowledging Sikh, Hare Krishna, Native American faiths). The Ten Commandments displays at issue in these cases should be viewed in the context of this broader pattern of cultural and diverse religious expression. Relevant Cases
|
