Sometimes it seems politicians strive for ways to waste time and public funds.
For example, city officials in Casper, Wyo., are dead set on frittering away taxpayer dollars on public promotion of religion.
Apparently facing no budget difficulties and itching to appease the city’s religious majority, Casper Mayor Kate Sarosy and other city officials today will dedicate a so-called “historic plaza,” containing a large granite Ten Commandments monument surrounded by other displays.
The plaza, noted on religionclause.blogspot.com, contains granite memorials that pay homage to the Declaration of Independence, the Magna Carta, the Mayflower Compact and the Bill of Rights. The display has its origins in the threat of a lawsuit several years ago. The Madison, Wis.-based Freedom From Religion Foundation vowed to go to court over the Commandments monument, which back then stood alone in a city park. In response, according to the Star-Tribune, city officials moved the monument into storage and began to consider ways to return it to public property.
The historic plaza concept, city officials seemingly believe, is the shield to any potential legal challenge grounded in the First Amendment principle of church-state separation. The city’s attorney told the Star-Tribune that the display satisfies current understanding of constitutional law. Thus city officials believe that by surrounding the religious monument with a host of others, mostly secular in nature, they have won the day.
But the newspaper reports on a couple of markers present at the plaza, which belie city officials’ claims. One marker states that all the monuments are “essential” parts of American law and another, next to the Commandments monument, calls it the “starting point of law.”
Casper officials are being disingenuous, promoting poor history and using public funds to skirt constitutional strictures.
Intentionally or not, local officeholders are advancing the Religious Right’s “Christian nation” view of America. The Ten Commandments are not part of American law or the foundation of our government, and slapping up a historic plaza will not change that reality.
Willamette College of Law professor Steven K. Green notes in a 1999-2000 article for Hamline University School of Law’s The Journal Of Law And Religion, “The historical record fails to support claims of a direct relationship between the law and the Ten Commandments. Absent the failed experiment in seventeenth century Massachusetts and the other Puritan colonies, American law has generally been viewed as having a secular origin and function.”
Unfortunately for the taxpayers of Casper, their elected representatives, instead of respecting the genius of the American Constitution, are using religion to score some political points by pandering to a favored base of voters.
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