Ten Commandments Update

I am not sure who's more confused, me or The Rev. Ewing Marietta.

Well, that's a bit facetious on my part I must admit. Perhaps neither of us are confused.  Perhaps each of us is only a teensy bit confused but confused about different things.  Who know?  Whatever the case, it sure looks to me like the good pastor is missing the point about why the Ten Commandment monument at the Connellsville Jr High is so offensive.

Or maybe he gets the point and is just looking to save face, as it were.

Let's go to the news coverage at the Trib:

The Thou Shall Not Move group plans to erect four new Ten Commandments monuments at upcoming dedication ceremonies while the Connellsville School District and the Freedom From Religion Foundation continue to wage a legal battle over a monument that has been located on school property for more than a half century.

The Rev. Ewing Marietta, pastor of Liberty Baptist Church and an organizer of Thou Shall Not Move, said the dedication events will take place at 12:45 p.m. Sept. 8 at 301 S. Pittsburgh St., Connellsville; 5 p.m. Sept. 15 at the corner of North Arch and Water streets near the Amtrak train station; 1 p.m. Sept. 29 near a bus stop in Dunbar; and 7 p.m. Oct. 5 at 105 Hoke St., Bullskin Township.

Looks like they're erecting some new monuments in the area but it also looks like these erections are on private property.

“We have requests from 52 different places that want Ten Commandments monuments placed on their property,” he said. “We're going down the list and starting with the places that requested the monuments first.”

Marietta said the monuments have already been placed outside the Connellsville Eagles Club on Arch Street, on the grounds of St. Paul's AME Church on Morgantown Street in Uniontown and at the Juniata United Methodist Church in Dunbar.

This, of course, is completely constitutional as each of these spaces is private property.

And I am not sure whether Marietta gets the irony of the Trib's last paragraph:

“Pennsylvania was founded by William Penn, a Quaker who was in prison in England three times because of his religion, and came to this country for religious freedom,” Marietta said. “People should be able to hold onto their religious morals and values without the threat of being thrown into jail. We don't want to force the Ten Commandments monuments on anyone, but we don't want them taken away from the public eye.”

Still don't see the irony here?  I'll give you a hint from pa.gov:

Many Englishmen accused the Friends of disloyalty to the Crown as well as to the Church of England. As a result, the British Parliament enacted a series of repressive religious measures known as the Clarendon Code. The strictures elevated Anglicanism to "established church" status and declared all other religious observances to be "non-conformist" and, hence, illegal.

So he was arrested for not conforming to an established church.  Isn't the establishment of a state church something barred by the 1st Amendment?  And isn't posting religious instructions on school property something that is just too close to establishing a state church to be constitutionally acceptable?

Why yes, yes it is.

And so is The Rev. Ewing Marietta as wrong about this historical metaphor as he is about the nature of the separation of church and state?

Hot patootie and bless my soul, he certainly is.

Ten Commandments Update

I usually don't respond to letters to the editor found in newspapers.  I figure that everyone's entitled to their own opinion (even if I think it's wrong).

However if a public figure writes a letter to the editor about an issue, and especially if I've written about that public figure and/or that issue then I feel free to comment.

Where am I going with this?  Here.

The Rev. Ewing Marietta, Senior Pastor of the Liberty Baptist Church in Union, PA has written a letter to the editor regarding the Ten Commandments monument in Connellsville.  (Should even I bother with an Exodus16:1-36 reference?  Perhaps not.)

In it Pastor Marietta makes a few misrepresentations of the facts.  Most incorrect is this one:

The Constitution has not changed, but now we are not allowed to display the Ten Commandments outside a public building.

While I am not in favor of a such religious display (for example a stand-alone monument depicting the Ten Commandments) "outside of a public building" that's not exactly the issue here.

The issue is that the monument is on public school grounds - and that's unconstitutional.

As I've written before, there is some Supreme Court precedent regarding the Ten Commandments "outside of a public building" but as Justice Breyer points out in his discussion of Van Orden V Perry:

This case, moreover, is distinguishable from instances where the Court has found Ten Commandments displays impermissible. The display is not on the grounds of a public school, where, given the impressionability of the young, government must exercise particular care in separating church and state.

So when the good pastor writes that "The fight is still on to save Connellsville's 10 Commandments monument. We can and must win this case." He's wrong on all counts as the fight is already over.  Public displays of the Ten Commandments are impermissible.

But I want to look at what Pastor Marietta writes next:

Should this monument even be an argument right now? We need moral absolutes more than ever.

Really? Moral absolutism is what we need right now?

Take a look at this:


In the video, Richard Dawkins is asked this question:

My question is for professor Dawkins. Considering that atheism can not possibly have any sense of absolute morality, would it not then be an irrational leap of faith, which atheists themselves so harshly condemn, for an atheist to decide between right and wrong?

And he answers:

Absolute morality - the absolute morality that a religious person might profess would include what? Stoning people for adultery? Death for apostasy?  Punishment for breaking the Sabbath? These are all things which are religiously based absolute moralities. I don't think I want an absolute morality. I think I want a morality that is thought-out, reasoned, argued, discussed and based upon, I'd almost say intelligent design. Can we not design our society, which has the sort of morality, the sort of society that we want to live in?  If you actually look at the moralities that are accepted among modern people, among 21st century people, we don't believe in slavery anymore. We believe in equality of women. We believe in being gentle. We believe in being kind to animals. These are all things which are entirely recent. They have very little basis in Biblical or Quranic scripture. They are things that have developed over historical time through a consensus of reasoning, of sober discussion, argument, legal theory, political and moral philosophy. These do not come from religion. To the extent that you can find the good bits in religious scriptures, you have to cherry pick. You search your way though the Bible or the Quran and you find the occasional verse that is an acceptable profession of morality and you say, "Look at that! That's religion!" and you leave out all the horrible bits and you say, "Oh, we don't believe that anymore. We've grown out of that." Well, of course we've grown out it. We've grown out of it because of secular moral philosophy and rational discussion."

But are those punishments really the case?  Let's take them one by one

• Stoning people for adultery?  Deuteronomy 22:22 says:

  If a man is found sleeping with another man’s wife, both the man who slept with her and the woman must die. You must purge the evil from Israel.

• Death for apostasy? Deuteronomy 13:6-9 says:

  6 If your very own brother, or your son or daughter, or the wife you love, or your closest friend secretly entices you, saying, “Let us go and worship other gods” (gods that neither you nor your ancestors have known, 7 gods of the peoples around you, whether near or far, from one end of the land to the other), 8 do not yield to them or listen to them. Show them no pity. Do not spare them or shield them. 9 You must certainly put them to death. Your hand must be the first in putting them to death, and then the hands of all the people.

• Punishment for breaking the Sabbath? Exodus 35:2 says:

  For six days, work is to be done, but the seventh day shall be your holy day, a day of sabbath rest to the Lord. Whoever does any work on it is to be put to death.

Is this what the good pastor means when he talks about how "we need moral absolutes" now?  It must be - the texts are from The Bible and they are clear as can be.

God, I hope not.

News For This Easter

They're still fighting the good fight in Connellsville over the unconstitutional Ten Commandments monument.

The Rev. Ewing Marietta, a leader for the “Save the Ten Commandments” group in Connellsville, called the battle “ground zero” and said it is time to take a stand.

Marietta made the statement during a meeting Wednesday at the Connellsville Eagles.

Marietta said the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the group that filed a lawsuit to have the Ten Commandments monument removed from the grounds of the Connellsville Junior High, is “trying to destroy our country.”

For those few of you not up to speed on this story, there's a decades old monument in at the Connellsville Junior High School.  It was a gift from the Fraternal Order of Eagles in 1957 and it was a PR tie-in to the Cecil B. DeMille epic, The Ten Commandments.

It's also unconstitutional.  I can't stress that enough.  According to the US Supreme Court in 1980, posting the Ten Commandments on public school grounds "has no secular legislative purpose" and is therefore Unconstitutional.  The decision went on to say that:

The pre-eminent purpose of posting the Ten Commandments, which do not confine themselves to arguably secular matters, is plainly religious in nature, and the posting serves no constitutional educational function.

So let's take a look at what the good Reverend has had to say about why the Commandments needs to stay on public school grounds in Connellsville:

“Our liberties cannot be taken away. They are a gift from God,” Marietta said. “The Ten Commandments are the basis of our laws. If we don't teach our children about the Ten Commandments, someday they will ask why they have to follow the laws of God and our nation.”

Each one of those statements has a problem.

• Liberties are taken away all the time (whether "gifts" from God or not).  Ask anyone who's in jail.  Or in prison.  You can even extend the argument (albeit it's on a much smaller scale) to anyone boarding a plane or a few decades ago anyone drafted into the Armed Forces.
• According to the Constitution (which fails to mention God at all), the Constitution itself is the Supreme Law of the Land.  If anyone can explain how the commandment "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" or the commandment "Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven images." or any of the others has anything to do with the Separation of Powers, or the First Amendment's prohibition (even at it's most narrowly drawn) of a State Religion, please let me know.
• It's this last sentence that's the most trouble for the Marietta.  To see why, just flip his argument over: The posting of the Ten Commandments will enable them to understand that they have to follow the laws of God.  How is that possible in a society governed, in part, by this sentence:

  Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;

Unless he was taken out of context (and there's no reason to think this), the Reverend Ewing Marietta wants the Connellsville school district to impose one particular religious idea onto the entire student body.

This is surprising to me (as I've written before) as his own church's website, on a page titled "What We Believe", in a section describing "Religious Liberty" we read:

Church and state should be separate. The state owes to every church protection and full freedom in the pursuit of its spiritual ends. In providing for such freedom no ecclesiastical group or denomination should be favored by the state more than others.

And:

The church should not resort to the civil power to carry on its work.

And yet, this is precisely what Marietta wants.  He's free to preach all he wants about the value of the Commandments but he's not free to use the civil authorities to amplify his message to anyone else.