Colonel John A. Eidsmoe, a retired Air Force judge advocate, is professor of constitutional law for Oak Brook College of Law and Government Policy and senior counsel and resident scholar for the Foundation for Moral Law.

From the print edition of The New American:

Conflicts over putting Ten Commandments displays on public grounds keep recurring, but they shouldn’t. The Ten Commandments form the foundation of federal and local laws.

Those Ten Commandments again! Just when the Left thinks they’ve buried the Decalog fully six feet under, they spring up again like perennial flowers on a courthouse lawn, in a city park, or on the grounds of a state capitol.

During the spring 2018 session, the Alabama Legislature passed a state constitutional amendment that, if approved by the voters in November, will authorize the placement of the Ten Commandments on public property. The amendment states:

Every person shall be at liberty to worship God according to the dictates of his or her own conscience. No person shall be compelled to attend, or, against his or her consent, to contribute to the erection or support of any place of religious worship, or to pay tithes, taxes, or other rates for the support of any minister of the gospel. Property belonging to the state may be used to display the Ten Commandments, and the right of a public school and public body to display the Ten Commandments on property owned or administrated by a public school or public body in this state is not restrained or abridged. The civil and political rights, privileges, and capacities of no person shall be diminished or enlarged on account of his or her religious belief. No public funds may be expended in defense of the constitutionality of this amendment.

The Ten Commandments shall be displayed in a manner that complies with constitutional requirements, including, but not limited to, being intermingled with historical or educational items, or both, in a larger display within or on property owned or administrated by a public school or public body.

If Alabama voters approve this amendment, it will likely face a court challenge. The challengers will argue that the Decalog is a religious document that has no place in the public arena, and that this amendment singles out the Ten Commandments for legal protection, thus preferring the Ten Commandments over other religious documents.

But there are valid grounds for defending and upholding the Ten Commandments Amendment:

• The Ten Commandments do not belong to any single religion. Today they are sometimes identified with Christianity, but Moses received them on behalf of the Hebrews on Mt. Sinai, and Muslims and other religious people accept them, as well. Martin Luther contended that the Ten Commandments summarize natural law principles that were written on the heart at the time of Creation:

The Decalog is not of Moses, nor did God give it to him first. On the contrary, the Decalog belongs to the whole world; it was written and engraved in the minds of all human beings from the beginning of the world.

• The Ten Commandments are not exclusively religious. Radical separationists simplistically assume that everything must be 100-percent religious or 100-percent secular. But a document may have both religious and secular components. In Van Orden v. Perry (2005), the Supreme Court upheld a Ten Commandments display on the lawn of the Texas State Capitol. In the plurality opinion, Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote: “Of course, the Ten Commandments are religious…. But Moses was a lawgiver as well as a religious leader. And the Ten Commandments have an undeniable historical meaning.” Justice Stephen Breyer observed in a concurring opinion in the same case:

In certain contexts, a display of the tablets of the Ten Commandments can convey not simply a religious message but also a secular moral message (about proper standards of social conduct). And in certain contexts, a display of the tablets can also convey a historical message (about a historic relation between those standards and the law) — a fact that helps to explain the display of those tablets in dozens of courthouses throughout the Nation, including the Supreme Court of the United States.

Ten years earlier, in Oliverson v. West Valley City, a federal district court made the same observation about the role of the Ten Commandments in governing social conduct:

The codes are often referred to for their religious importance, however, in fact, in Hebraic history they were in part legal codes governing the social conduct of the societies to which they applied. The Biblical books are ancient legal codes and histories. It would be wrong to assume the Hebraic references are merely religious commands.

Clearly, the Ten Commandments are a moral, civil, and criminal code, as well as a religious document.

• The proposed amendment requires that Ten Commandments displays conform to U.S. constitutional requirements. Presumably this includes considerations imposed by various court decisions, such as that the commandments must be displayed in context with other historical documents such as the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, or the Mayflower Compact.

• The proposed amendment prohibits the use of public funds for the legal defense of Ten Commandments displays. Presumably that defense would be undertaken by private organizations such as the Foundation for Moral Law, Alliance Defending Freedom, or Liberty Counsel.

• The amendment does not prohibit other displays. It singles out the Ten Commandments for protection because the Ten Commandments have been singled out for attack. The Decalog is one of the most, if not the most, censored documents in America today.

• Most importantly, other documents are not on an equal footing with the Ten Commandments. Whatever merits there may be in the display of the Code of Hammurabi, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Laws of Manu, or the Analects of Confucius, none of these have influenced Western jurisprudence as have the Ten Commandments. more at https://www.thenewamerican.com/print-magazine/item/29367-why-won-t-the-ten-commandments-just-go-away