The Supreme Court is considering whether two governmental displays of the Ten Commandments—one in Kentucky, another in Texas—violate the First Amendment

National Review, March 28, 2005

* The Supreme Court is considering whether two governmental displays of the Ten Commandments--one in Kentucky, another in Texas--violate the First Amendment. The question is often thought to turn on whether the government is endorsing the religious tradition of which the commandments are a part or is merely providing a history lesson or a bit of empty ceremony.

Once it heads down this path, the Court quickly finds itself basing constitutional law on its authoritative pronouncements on the psychology of teenagers (as in the public-prayer cases) or on the distance between Rudolph and the manger (as in the Nativity-scene cases). It can wander out of this maze of its own construction by returning to originalism. Nobody really supposes that the public, at the time of the Founding, thought that the mere acknowledgment of a Creator and of the moral norms that flow from monotheism amounted to an "establishment of religion." Nor did anyone think that the point of the First Amendment was to make the Supreme Court a micromanager of church-state relations at every level of government. The New York Times editorializes, "The founders may not have anticipated a country with many Hindu and Buddhist Americans, but they were wise enough to write a document that protects their rights." That is entirely correct, as long as we understand that their rights remain perfectly intact when they see a Judeo-Christian monument.