moore_82503

Posted: 8/22/03

Ten Commandments judge
told again, 'Thou shall not'

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (ABP) –Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore was overruled by his colleagues, who ordered Moore's monument to the Ten Commandments removed from public areas of the Alabama judicial building in Montgomery Aug. 21.

After a special conference that day, the court's eight associate justices, without dissent, ordered the building manager to remove a two-ton monument to the Protestant King James translation of the commandments. Moore had placed the monument in the center of the building's rotunda during the summer of 2001–without the associate justices' consent or knowledge.

Last fall, U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson declared the display in violation of the U.S. Constitution's ban on government endorsement of religion. After being upheld unanimously by a panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Thompson ordered the monument removed by Aug. 20, threatening to levy fines against the state if Moore did not comply with his injunction. Moore refused, saying to do so would violate the state constitution. Moore claims that document allows the state to “acknowledge God” as the source of law.

But the eight associate justices–seven of them, like Moore, Republicans–invoked a little-used Alabama law that allowed them to overrule an administrative decision of the chief justice. The building manager erected partitions Aug. 21 to block the monument from public view.

Moore's supporters had been gathering outside the courthouse in recent days. About 500 people filled the plaza for a rally Aug. 20, the deadline for the monument's removal. Inside, 22 people who locked arms around the monument were arrested after they refused to leave when the building closed, according to the Montgomery Advertiser.

Moore, in another part of the state, reportedly cut his trip short to return to Montgomery upon hearing the justices' decision. According to the New York Times, he ordered the partitions removed and threatened to jail his fellow justices.

But in their order, his peers issued a stern rebuke to Moore. “The justices of this court are bound by solemn oath to follow the law, whether they agree or disagree with it,” they said. Moore's continued failure to comply with a higher court's order “would impair the authority and ability of all the courts of this state to enforce their judgments,” they added.

In a statement released through a spokesman, Moore said of the move to hide the monument from view, “This is an example of what is happening in this country: the acknowledgment of God as the moral foundation of law in this nation is being hidden from us.”

Moore's supporters reacted angrily to the associate justices' decision. “What they did was against the Lord,” said Rusty Thomas, a Waco minister quoted in a New York Times online story. “They betrayed a righteous man,” said Thomas, who called the other justices “Judases.”

Moore is a Southern Baptist. At least one of his fellow justices is as well, and all others except one list memberships in Episcopal or Methodist churches in their biographies on the state court's website. Senior Associate Justice Gorman Houston is a Methodist Sunday School teacher and the father of a minister.

Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor, himself a Republican, a Catholic and a previous defender of Moore's action, endorsed the associate justices' decision after it was announced. “The taxpayers of this state should not be punished for the refusal of the chief justice to follow a federal court order,” he said.

The state could incur fines to exceed $1 billion in four months if the monument is not removed, said Gov. Bob Riley.

Riley, also a Southern Baptist, released an Aug. 21 statement saying, “Although I fundamentally disagree with what the federal courts have ordered, the state Supreme Court was correct in unanimously voting to uphold the rule of law.” He added, “Because we are a society of laws, the Alabama Supreme Court has a duty to comply with the federal court order, whether they agree with it or not.”

However, Riley also said he would be willing to file a friend-of-the-court brief in Moore's behalf asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the ruling. Moore ran out of legal options for keeping the monument in place for the immediate future late on the afternoon of Aug. 20 when that court declined to delay implementation of Thompson's order pending Moore's appeal.

The U.S. Supreme Court never has ruled directly on a case about the display of the Ten Commandments in a public building. But lower federal courts have ruled consistently that such displays may be permissible as long as they would not, to a reasonable viewer, convey an endorsement of Christianity over other religions and as long as they appear as part of a larger display with other historic legal documents. Such a display of tablets depicting commandments appears on a frieze at the Supreme Court building itself.