Richmond Times Dispatch - Panelists Debate Religion, Law and Ten Commandments

BY ANDREW PETKOFSKY
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER
Feb 22, 2005
 
WILLIAMSBURG -- American democracy is in danger of letting a religious majority impose its will on everyone else, U.S. Rep. Robert C. Scott warned yesterday.
 
An outspoken advocate of civil liberties, Scott, D-3rd, told law students at the College of William and Mary that he believes religious activists in politics and the law are waging a "deceptive" campaign to erode important principles including church-state separation and protection against job discrimination.

Scott was one of four panelists who had been asked to discuss legal issues surrounding the public display of the Ten Commandments and two cases on that topic that will be argued next month before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The other three panelists were legal experts on the issue, and two of them, Nadine Strossen, president of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, will play roles on opposite sides in preparing or arguing the upcoming cases.

Both of them, and W&M law professor William Van Alstyne, provided insight into the issue and the legal history of controversy over the public display of religious symbols by government agencies such as courts and schools.

Scott, also a lawyer, said the cases are linked, from his perspective as a lawmaker, to a trend in which politicians and activists with strong religious feeling trample on the rights of others while professing to merely protect their own rights.

The display of a set of commandments that have religious significance only to certain religious denominations is only one manifestation of the danger, Scott said.

The same threat is present in laws passed as part of President Bush's "faith-based initiative" that will allow religious organizations to discriminate in hiring for social-service programs financed with federal tax money, he said.

Religious groups always have been allowed to hire whomever they wish to employ for religious activities paid for with their own money, Scott said. But they have been prohibited since major civil-rights laws passed in the 1960s to use race or religion as a factor in hiring for programs paid for with federal money.

Proponents of the change claim they're restoring freedom to religious organizations, but "if anything is being restored, [it's] ugly practices of discrimination," Scott said.

"You can put lipstick on a pig, but you can't pass it off as a beauty queen," he said. "You can't dress up 'We don't hire Catholics, Jews and Hindus' with poll-tested semantics and pass it off as anything other than ugly discrimination."

One of the upcoming Supreme Court cases involves challenges to the display of the Ten Commandments in two courthouses and a school in Kentucky. The other involves a challenge seeking to remove a granite monument, which includes an etching of the Ten Commandments, from the grounds of the Texas capitol.

Sekulow, who fights on the side of allowing display of the commandments, said there's no denying their religious nature. But he said the commandments are also moral and legal symbols with secular significance, so their display does not need to be seen as an illegal government endorsement of a certain religion.

Strossen, who takes the opposite view, pointed out that the contents of the commandments vary from one religious denomination to another. So the adoption of one version by a government not only endorses a religion but may even create friction among the religious.

Van Alstyne pointed to the complexity of the issue by noting that when the First Amendment was added to the Constitution, prohibiting Congress from the establishment of religion, various state governments had established state religions.

So at that time, early in the country's history, the amendment could be seen as protecting the states' rights to have established religions. While that view was nullified by later court decisions, he said, it makes the legal issue more complex.