Supreme Court weighs Commandments cases

Poll: Most Americans back displays
An AP-Ipsos poll taken in late February found 76 percent supportive of and 23 percent opposed to Ten Commandments displays.

Past polling has found majority support for the general concept of separation of church and state. That sentiment is not always reflected when people are asked about specific cases.

Support for the Ten Commandments displays was strong among most groups in the AP poll of 1,000 adults conducted by Ipsos-Public Affairs Feb. 22-24. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Older adults were more likely to feel the Ten Commandments should be allowed on government property. People with only a high school education or some college were more likely to favor allowing the display of the Ten Commandments than those with college degrees.

People in the Midwest and South were more likely than those in other regions to favor allowing such displays.

Background to the cases
In the Texas case, Thomas Van Orden lost his lawsuit to have a 6-foot granite monument removed from the state Capitol grounds.

The Fraternal Order of Eagles donated the exhibit to the state in 1961, and it was installed about 75 feet from the Capitol in Austin. The group gave thousands of similar monuments to American towns during the 1950s and ’60s, and those have been the subject of multiple court fights.

Two Kentucky counties, meanwhile, hung framed copies of the Ten Commandments in their courthouses and added other documents, such as the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence, after the American Civil Liberties Union challenged the display.

While one lower court found the Texas display to be predominantly nonreligious because it was one of 17 monuments in a 22-acre park, another court struck down the Kentucky displays as lacking a “secular purpose.” Kentucky’s modification of the display was a “sham” for the religious intent behind it, the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled.

The last time the Supreme Court weighed in on the issue was 1980, when it struck down a Kentucky law requiring Ten Commandments displays in public classrooms. Since then, more than two dozen courts have ruled in conflicting ways on displays in various public contexts.

Justices have outlined several different tests in recent years to determine their constitutionality:

• Secular purpose; was there religious motive?
• Endorsement; do they show a government neutrality toward religion?
• Coercion; do they place impermissible pressure, such as school prayer?
• Historical practice; are they part of the “fabric of our society,” such as legislative prayer?

The Supreme Court frieze, for instance, depicts Moses and the tablets as well as 17 other figures including Hammurabi, Confucius, Napoleon and Chief Justice John Marshall. Because it includes secular figures in a way that doesn’t endorse religion, the display would be constitutional, Justice John Paul Stevens suggested in a 1989 ruling.

The cases are Van Orden v. Perry, 03-1500, and McCreary County v. ACLU, 03-1693.

A ruling is expected by the end of June.

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