Ten Commandment challenges spread

Last April, the justices let stand a decision barring the display of the Ten Commandments outside Kentucky's State Capitol. A year earlier, the justices refused to take up an appeal involving a similar display ordered removed from Indiana's State House lawn.

In 2001, the justices declined to consider whether a Ten Commandments monument outside the municipal building in Elkhart, Ind., was unconstitutional. It had been on display in that location since 1958.

In an unusual move, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, joined by Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, issued a written dissent to the court's decision not to consider the Elkhart case. "The city is not bound to display only symbols that are wholly secular, or to convey solely secular messages," the chief justice wrote. "The fact that the monument conveys some religious meaning does not cast doubt on the city's valid secular purposes for its display."

Chief Justice Rehnquist said the Ten Commandments display "is part of the city's celebration of its cultural and historical roots, not a promotion of religious faith."

Justice John Paul Stevens disagreed. In a statement supporting the court's action in refusing to hear the case, he said the first two lines of the monument are presented in larger type and include the statement: "I am the Lord thy God."

"The graphic emphasis placed on those first lines is rather hard to square with the proposition that the monument expresses no particular religious preference," he wrote.

Although the general trend among judges has been to rule against Ten Commandments displays, not all judges are striking them down. A federal appeals court in Philadelphia in late June upheld a Ten Commandments display on a 1920 bronze plaque at the Chester County Courthouse in Pennsylvania.

"The age and history of the plaque provide a context which changes the effect of an otherwise religious plaque," the panel ruled.

Last Monday, a federal judge in Pittsburgh adopted the same reasoning, ruling that a Ten Commandments plaque - installed in 1918 - could remain on display at the Allegheny County Courthouse.

In contrast, in mid-July a federal judge in La Crosse, Wis., ordered the city to remove a Ten Commandments monument from a city park because, she said, it made some community members "feel they were not welcome, that they did not belong in La Crosse unless they followed Judeo-Christian traditions." The monument had been there since 1965.

"The First Amendment guarantees persons of all faiths that the government will treat them with equal concern and respect," wrote US District Judge Barbara Crabb.

Many of the battles over the Ten Commandments never make it to court. The City of Milwaukee, Rehnquist's hometown, agreed to remove a Ten Commandments monument from public property after the Supreme Court declined to take up the Elkhart case.

Two weeks ago, local officials voted 8 to 0 to remove a Ten Commandments monument from outside the Wyandotte County Courthouse in Kansas. It is slated to move across the street to the grounds of a church.

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