The issue at hand

Humanist, Nov-Dec, 2003 by Fred Edwords

No, the Ten Commandments are not the "cornerstone of our legal heritage," despite Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor saying so on August 21, 2003, when reluctantly complying with the Alabama Supreme Court's order to obey a federal injunction to remove "Roy's Rock," a 2.5 ton Ten Commandments monument, from the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building. It had been surreptitiously placed there two years ago by Roy Moore, chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. He expressed his reasons in a recent radio interview.

   They put a symbol of Venus, the goddess of justice, the Greek
   goddess of
   justice, in front of the courthouse and they haven't moved their
   Greek
   goddess. And that's not what our justice system is founded upon.
   Our
   justice
   system is founded upon the laws of God. If you look at the
   Declaration
   [of Independence], you see it very plainly in the first sentence.

But every statement is incorrect. First of all, Venus is the Roman goddess of love. The Greek goddess of justice is Dike (the name itself being the Greek word for justice). This common courtroom symbol, blindfolded and holding a scale, was called Justicia by the Romans. Moreover, our justice system can indeed trace roots back to ancient Greece, but more directly to ancient Rome. The language of law is, after all, Latin, not Greek or Hebrew. As for the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence, the expression used is "Nature's God," a term of art from Enlightenment Deism, not Christianity or Judaism.

Looking deeper we see that the Germanic peoples who invaded the Roman Empire in the fifth century brought with them their own concepts of justice. These, wedded to Roman ideas, became the basis for later European systems, including English common law. Thomas Jefferson, who dealt with this question in his own time, wrote the following in a letter to Thomas Cooper on February 10, 1814:

   For we know that the common law is that system of law which was
   introduced
   by the Saxons on their settlement of England.... This settlement
   took place about the middle of the fifth century. But Christianity
   was not
   introduced till the seventh century; the conversion of the first
   Christian
   king of the Heptarchy having taken place about the year 598, and
   that of
   the last about 686. Here then, was a space of two hundred years,
   during
   which the common law was in existence, and Christianity no part
   of it.

Alan Dershowitz's recent book, America Declares Independence, sets forth additional arguments, exploring the history, theology, and political theory behind the Declaration of Independence, a document which he argues was based "in science and in reason and not in the Bible."

Nonetheless, Moore refuses to budge: "I will never, never deny the God upon whom our laws and our country are based." And so we see a reinvigoration of the attack on our secular government, summarized by Anne Lyster in this issue's "Watch on the Right" column. In "Up Front," Sarah J. McCarthy addresses the contradictions in Christian fundamentalist thinking about gay rights. This leads naturally to an exploration of the problems generated or exacerbated by politicized religious thinking: Kate Michelman's cover story on current threats to reproductive freedom, Charlene Gomes' look at gay parenthood, and Joaquin Cabrejas' analysis of how religion has been used as a motivation for recent U.S. wars.

Clearly, it isn't just a circus sideshow when a judge proclaims that law and public policy is or ought to be based on traditional religion. It's a signpost to the main event.