Power from the people

The Supreme Court is taking on the weighty matter of whether or not the display of the Ten Commandments is a violation of the First Amendment, or if the justices are going to have to violate it themselves.

To refresh, the relevant part of the First Amendment says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

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For the Ten Commandments to violate the first part of that sentence, Moses would have had to have been a member of Congress.

And for the Supreme Court to ban the Ten Commandments from public view as an expression of religion, the Supreme Court will have to violate the second part.

Really, this doesn't seem so hard. The Ten Commandments weren't discovered by the Mormons in 1840 – the Founding Fathers were aware of them when they included those words in the First Amendment. Most of them referred to them when formulating the nation's earliest laws.

It would seem, following modern revisionist logic, that the Founding Fathers knew they were outlawing the Ten Commandments when they penned the First Amendment – and that they intended to do so.

Except that those same Fathers went on to praise the Ten Commandments and the role that "Providence" played in America's foundation for many years after that without an uproar about "Congress passing laws establishing religion" when they did so.

While it might make sense to argue in a modern Supreme Court that the intentions of the Framers to were to forbid any mention of religion in the public square, the Supreme Court that presided in the days of the Founding Fathers didn't think so.

And they were in a position to ask the Founding Fathers directly, if they weren't clear.

If the Ten Commandments are an endorsement of "religion," then the next question to address is: Which religion? According to the "separation" lobby, displaying the Ten Commandments is an explicit endorsement of Christianity.

The Ten Commandments were handed down by Moses, not Jesus. The purpose of the Law was to testify to man's failure before the Law and point to man's need of a Savior.

That Savior identified Himself by being the only man to keep the first commandment, before He was put to death under the authority of that same Law.

By His death, He paid the penalty for the transgressions of all mankind – said transgressions being defined by a twisting of the Ten Commandments. He was crucified to fulfill the Law and to release believers from bondage to the Law that condemned the sinner to eternal separation from God.

So the Ten Commandments are decidedly not a symbol of the Christian religion. If anything, they symbolize the Law that nailed the Savior to His cross.

The Ten Commandments are the foundational documents of the Jewish religion, but the existence of a monument to the Ten Commandments is not to pay homage to a religion shared by approximately one percent of Americans.

It hangs in courthouses throughout America because it is the foundational document of Western common law and had been for centuries before the Pilgrims ever saw Plymouth Rock.

A monument to the Ten Commandments hangs over the same Supreme Court now trying to determine if displaying the Ten Commandments is the equivalent to Congress establishing a state religion – said "religion" to be identified later.

The Jews have one version of the Ten Commandments, Catholics another, and there is a third version, excerpted directly from the book of Exodus, for Protestants and non-denominational believers. So, it's a loose endorsement of "religion" at best.

Belief in "God" is not a religion – the word "god" denotes a supreme being or deity. The Supreme Court previously held that secular humanism is a "religion" in that it worships a "deity" [man] and was therefore deserving of a religious 501(c)3 tax exemption.

One's head can begin to spin around in circles considering it all – Americans endorse the Ten Commandment displays by a majority of 3 to 1, and in America, the government, theoretically, is the majority.

Everyone is granted the right to freedom of religion, but the religion of the majority is less free, since it is the religion of the majority, according to all polling data.

According to a recent Pew Research Poll, some 72 percent of Americans think it is appropriate for the Ten Commandments to be displayed in government buildings. The rights of those 72 percent hang in the balance, weighed against the rights of a tiny minority to whom, by definition, worship is a meaningless act, anyway. Are you getting dizzy, yet?

The Ten Commandments do endorse the existence of God, but so does the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration of Independence declares, among other things, that our rights are granted by God, following the logical assumption that what God has granted, government cannot take away.

But what if the government takes away God?

Then our rights are guaranteed by nobody and are therefore at risk from everybody, as the case now before the Court proves.

In the final analysis, the Ten Commandments debate isn't about religion – it's about authority. Under whose authority does the government derive the right to govern?

In a constitutional republic, such as America's, that authority is granted – according to the Declaration of Independence – by the Creator.

In a pure democracy, the authority to govern is derived by "the people" (who are clever enough to get elected) – which is why the Founding Fathers chose to set America up as a constitutional republic in the first place.

Because what "the people" give, "the people" can take away.