Supreme law and the Supreme Court

Reading over my Catholic Pundit contract I see that I am required by law to say something about the whole Ten Commandments monument debacle.

Judge Moore could have avoided this whole problem a long time ago. All he would have had to do was to incorporate elephant dung somehow into the monument. Or maybe suspend the whole thing in a vat of urine or maybe one of those tacky statues of a boy peeing on them. He could have then called it art and then all these groups including the ACLU would have been on his side instead of shouting that separation of church-state nonsense. I am convinced that this whole church-state thing is a false memory implanted on the societal subconscious since it has nothing to do with the actual documents of this country as The Mighty Barrister has aptly posted over the last week.

These church-state mantra singers have had no problem in the past with the government support of artists mocking religion. You can desecrate any Catholic or Christian iconography and it magically becomes art protected by the first amendment. But dare to erect a monument that does not mock the basis of the laws and beliefs of our founders it is neither art or protected under the first amendment.

Now whether this monument goes or stays will have no impact on court decisions in the future. The Supreme Court has the same Ten Commandments embedded in the walls of the court and have shown no compunction to following them and have easily ignored them. Though maybe we could do a little spin of the decalogue by presenting them as foreign laws first appearing in an Arab desert during the Exodus. Justices Kennedy and Ginsburg recently cited laws from other countries to interpret our Constitution. Justice Kennedy cited two decisions by the European Court of Human Rights in reference to the Texas Sodomy law. Justice Ginsburg said �Your perspective on constitutional law should encompass the world,� she told assembled convention. �We are the losers if we do not both share our experiences with and learn from others.�

You can see how much we have lost any relevance in the national focus when we obsess about the monument in Alabama but no references are made to the outrageous comments made from those on the Supreme Court. That a decision could be made based not on laws of this country but another should be a national scandal. If one of the conservative justices wrote an opinion on abortion based on the laws of Ireland there would be hell to pay for such an act, and justly so.