Supreme Court Update posted by Ben

They've just been busy little bees over in D.C. this week.

First, the Supreme Court, by a 5-4 margin, decided that executing minors (as allowed in 19 states) isn't constitutional. What gets me about the dissent, though, is that it for a large part was based on the majority's recognition of general international law and standards. Forget whether or not we should be killing minors; we'd better not let those crazy non-Americans have any say in our down-home interpretation of the law.

I mean, we're America, right? Aren't we supposed to always and unequivocally hold the high moral ground over the rest of the world? It's not like we sponsor torture, execute prisoners, let corporations determine our environmental policy, preemptively invade other countries on false pretenses, back out of international missile treaties, take away funding from family planning groups working in third-world countries, make the motions of diplomacy while planning future attacks, or attempt to break the national budget so we have an excuse to end the social safety net. Right?

But forget all of that. Today the Supreme Court announced that they're going to tackle an issue that's really important: the display of the Ten Commandments on government property. As usual, both sides of the argument are presenting convoluted legal arguments for their perspective that have far less to do with what they're saying than with their underlying agendas. Here's a fast, totally biased primer:

The folks who want the Ten Commandments displayed want the American government to be more of a theocracy.

The folks who don't want them displayed are out to stop the first group from turning us into a theocracy.

Both groups just happen to be fighting their ideological battles on the largely symbolic and mostly harmless ground about the display of a document that is both historical and religious. And it has almost nothing to do with the actual question: "Is America supposed to be a Christian nation?" That's why people are fighting so passionately.

And regardless of claims that the theocratists make about America being founded as a Christian country, the Constitution does expressly separate church and state. So any legal battle won which blurs that distinction is hugely important to the people who would rather we ran the country on hard-core Old Testament law. (You know, like they do with the Koran in Iran?) And they will lie until their teeth are blue that folks on the left are fighting them because they hate Christianity, which is a David Copperfield-worthy misdirection. What we're fighting for is the freedom of religion for people of all faiths, a freedom which state-sponsored religion would in large part destroy.

We are familiar with the First Amendment, right?

On its own, display of the Ten Commandments is largely harmless. Had it not been adopted as a symbol by both sides, a symbol that represented far more to their respective constituencies than a code of law, this argument would not be happening. And now, it merely remains to see whether the Supreme Court will acknowledge that symbolic value in their June ruling, or more likely, if they will sidestep it altogether and allow the real, publicly unspoken issues to remain seething below the surface, waiting for another opportunity to use and abuse legal precedents and principles to insert another element of biblical law into government policy.

And why aren't we hearing of a massive Christian initiative to institute "Turn the Other Cheek," or better yet, "Beware to those who load people down with the crushing burden of laws and regulations but do nothing to help them?"