No Religious Monuments, Court Rules

The Supreme Court said no to the Ten Commandments again Tuesday as the justices refused to review a ruling that could force hundreds of cities to remove from government property granite monuments listing the Old Testament mandates.

On a 6-3 vote, the justices turned away lawyers for the Christian Coalition who argued that the Ten Commandments deserve a place of honor because of their history and their significance as a code of conduct.

They were defending the city of Elkhart, Ind., whose six-foot-tall marker bearing the biblical commandments has stood in front of City Hall since 1958.

Three years ago, two city residents, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, challenged the monument as an unconstitutional “establishment of religion.” They relied on a 1980 Supreme Court ruling that prohibited the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools.

In December, the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago agreed, saying that the commandments cannot be “stripped of their religious, indeed sacred, significance.” They begin with the words, “I Am the Lord Thy God,” the judges noted. For this reason, the lower court said, the commandments carry a religious message that is inappropriate for a government agency to deliver.

In his appeal on Elkhart’s behalf, attorney Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice said the 7th Circuit’s ruling could force “the removal not only of Elkhart’s monument, but hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of other virtually identical monuments across the nation.”

Sekulow had a ready ally in Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. Throughout his nearly 30-year career on the Supreme Court, he has disagreed with the view that the Constitution requires such a strict separation of church and state. He says the 1st Amendment merely forbids government favoritism for a single religious sect.

But Rehnquist fell short again Tuesday in finding the votes to overturn the strict separation view. In City of Elkhart vs. Books, 00-1407, only Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas voted with him to review the lower court ruling.

The monument listing the commandments “does not express the city’s preference for particular religions,” Rehnquist said in dissent. “It simply reflects the Ten Commandments’ role in the development of our legal system.”

Justice John Paul Stevens, who clashes regularly with Rehnquist on issues of religion, issued a statement disputing his view of the case. He noted the large words “I Am the Lord Thy God” at the top of the monument are “rather hard to square with the proposition that the monument expresses no particular religious preference.”

The granite slabs have an interesting history that has nothing to do with Moses and the Bible.

During the 1950s, a juvenile court judge in Minnesota and Hollywood producer Cecil B. DeMille played key roles in bringing the Ten Commandments to small towns across the Midwest.

The judge, E.J. Ruegemer, believed the youth of the day needed a code of conduct, and the Ten Commandments supplied it. DeMille was promoting his epic 1956 film, “The Ten Commandments,” and suggested granite monuments, not just paper placards.

The Fraternal Order of Eagles, a national service organization, launched a program to donate the monuments. The city of Elkhart dedicated its new monument on Memorial Day 1958 with remarks by the town’s Protestant, Catholic and Jewish leaders.

Meanwhile, in other actions, the court:

* Made it harder for civil rights lawyers to have their fees paid, even if they succeed in winning for their clients.

The 5-4 ruling is only the latest to narrow the civil rights law. To encourage the enforcement of these laws, Congress has said lawyers who are the “prevailing party” in a case are entitled to have their fees paid by the losing party. But the justices limited that term to mean only someone who wins a judicial ruling.

In a West Virginia case, lawyers sued to stop the eviction of some elderly patients from a nursing home, and they succeeded when the state changed its rules. But since no court ruled on the matter, the majority said these lawyers were not the “prevailing party.”

In a dissent read in the courtroom, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called this a “legally unwarranted, stunningly harsh judgment.” (Buckhannon Board and Care Home vs. West Virginia, 99-1848)

* Said nurses and other health care workers cannot join labor unions if their duties include supervising others. The 5-4 decision limits unions from organizing the health care industry. The familiar conservative majority consisted of Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas along with Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony M. Kennedy. (NLRB vs. Kentucky River Community Care, 99-1815).