WASHINGTON — 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."
