Nonsense-Making Over Religion

A federal appeals court Tuesday waded into a silly little whirlwind of a dispute and got itself twisted up. In a 2-1 ruling, the court in Cincinnati held that Ohio’s official state motto, “In God, all things are possible,” violates the constitutional separation of church and state. If the decision stands and Ohio’s motto has to go, the state will have to reprint its official stationery and tax forms and excavate the bronze placard embedded in the sidewalk outside the capitol in Columbus.

Passionate debate over the role of religion in a secular democracy has hardly cooled 200-plus years after the framers wisely decreed that “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Just last month, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in a case, this one from Texas, about the constitutionality of student-led prayer at official school events such as graduation and football games.

In their questions, the justices seemed skeptical, as well they should be, of claims that such invocations or prayers to a captive audience did not constitute an official endorsement of religion.

Yet the Ohio motto case goes to a ridiculous extreme. What’s next? Should we reprint U.S. currency because the bills say, “In God We Trust?” Redraft the Pledge of Allegiance, to excise the line, “One Nation, under God, indivisible . . . ?”

The Ohio decision is just the latest legal nonsense-making over religion. The state Legislature adopted the “In God, all things are possible” motto in 1959, drawn from a passage in the New Testament. Now, 41 years later, the American Civil Liberties Union, representing a Presbyterian minister who claimed the motto was a vain invocation of the name of God, brought suit to have the slogan invalidated.

The appeals court agreed with the minister but not with his argument, deciding that the motto had to go because it “is an endorsement of Christianity by the state of Ohio.” Watch out South Dakota and Arizona, whose mottoes also invoke the name of God: You may be next.

And here in the City of Angels--that’s angels, as in those winged messengers of God--maybe we’ll have to consider some changes too.