The Ten Commandments

The Supreme Court will spend several months deciding whether it wants to ban the ten commandments from all public property. It apparently will take that long for them to check with the European Union to get their opinion on what our laws should be.

Some commentators have envisioned phalanxes of bulldozers unleashed all across the land this summer smashing existing monuments to powder, while others think this scenario is too alarmist:

The bigger danger to society would be if the monuments were allowed on public land, putting a huge crack in the wall between church and state, say opposition groups. "Our concern is that they would start increasing and the religious right would start marking places," said Christopher Arntzen, chair of the Gay and Lesbian Atheists and Humanists. "There's a danger to civil liberties. A lot of the religious right is directed against non-believers."

Christopher Arntzen has a point. If we allow the Ten Commandments to grace our public spaces as we have for the last two centuries, why, then the wall of separation between Church and state will surely crumble. Indeed, it's a miracle that it hasn't collapsed before now since all sorts of people have been inspired to turn this country into a theocracy by public displays of the Ten Commandments.

Why, we heard of a gentleman on a tour of the Supreme Court building where, ironically enough, the Ten Commandments are in evidence, who upon seeing them with his own eyes fell to his knees and swore an oath that he would single-handedly, if necessary, restore Christendom to the throne of government. We've also heard of countless schoolchildren who have let their gaze fall upon the Ten Commandments and consequently reverted to thumb-sucking and bed-wetting at night. We simply can't tolerate this sort of thing in a pluralist society.

Once the Court has banned the Ten Commandments, of course, there will be no stopping it. It will have no grounds for failing to abolish the under God phrase in the pledge, it will certainly have to ordain that all currency bearing the motto In God We Trust be removed forthwith from circulation, and it will perforce be compelled to prohibit all prayer, all mention of God, in public spaces and public events.

Thus will the secularists have succeeded in imposing their vision of a sanitized public square, scrubbed free of all residue of religious belief, upon the rest of the nation. A glorious future awaits us.