A lot of issues surround the Ten Commandments case in front of the Supreme Court today and, regardless of what the ACLU would have us believe, government promotion of religion is not one of the major ones.
For example, a more important issue in the case is the question of why the ACLU continues to attack Christianity exclusively. If they were really interested in banning all religious references from public ground, as Terence Jeffrey points out, they would have to sue to remove the Native American exhibit at the Smithsonian. They won’t, however, because they are not interested in banning any non-Christian religious references or symbols. They showed this in the recent flap over the LA County seal, when the ACLU sued to remove a tiny cross in the seal’s corner while not mentioning the gigantic image of the goddess Pomona that took up it’s entire middle section.
I believe the ACLU is out to remove Christianity from government life because it does not like the moral standards that come with a Judeo-Christian worldview. Anyone can put up with Native American spiritualism or the Roman goddess Pomona because they don’t require anything from us. But if the God of the Bible is true, then we might have to actually live differently and many people just don’t want that.
The ironic thing about the ACLU’s quest is that the Biblical worldview that traditionally under-girded our public morality has already been abandoned in the very courtroom they are fighting in. Just read the Supreme Court’s decision from yesterday regarding capital punishment for juveniles (and check out a great post about this decision from David Limbaugh):
The prohibition against "cruel and unusual
punishments," like other expansive language in the Constitution, must
be interpreted according to its text, by considering history,
tradition, and precedent, and with due regard for its purpose and
function in the constitutional design. To implement this framework we
have established the propriety and affirmed the necessity of referring
to "the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a
maturing society" to determine which punishments are so
disproportionate as to be cruel and unusual.
Evolving standards of decency? It doesn’t look like the ACLU has anything to worry about.