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ACLU rides again, as we are advised by the Wall Street Journal's
Jess Bravin, reporting out of Elkhart,
Indiana. The
script: In 1956, Cecil B. DeMille is promoting his movie, The
Ten Commandments. A judge in St. Cloud, Minnesota, gets in touch
with the great moviemaker, and he has an idea: Combine publicity
for The Ten Commandments with the elevation of public morals.
How? Create memorial slabs of the Ten Commandments to exhibit, in
our amber waves of grain and on our purple mountaintops, from sea
to shining sea. One of the landing spots for the Ten Commandments
monsoon was Elkhart, Indiana, and that tablet led to the trauma
from which William A. Books now suffers.
That tablet,
an idea cosponsored by Hollywood and the Minnesota judge, was unveiled
on Memorial Day in 1958. Not much attention was paid to it, the
neglect causing it to be obscured by shrubs, more or less pari
passu, if your mind runs that way, with the neglect of the Ten
Commandments in the past four decades. But then came a municipal
development project, and lo! this resulted in the repristination
of the tablet, such that even bicyclists coasting by could spot
it.
That exactly
was what Mr. Books was doing on that day in 1998, bicycling by.
He filed an affidavit recording that he was "extremely upset
and bothered" to see the Ten Commandments on display because
they symbolized a religion he does not practice. So what did he
do? He rang 911-ACLU and reported that the Constitution of the United
States was being violated in broad daylight in the heart of America.
A federal appeals
court in Chicago agreed with Mr. Books, but the legal question has
been complicated. Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the American Center
for Law and Justice, will defend Elkhart, and he has devised an
arresting means of doing so. The Ten Commandments tablet had nothing
to do with the propagation of religion, he argues. It had to do
with commerce! Therefore, it had a secular purpose; therefore, it
escaped the prohibitions of Lemon v. Kurtzman, in
which the Supreme Court insisted that any use of religious material
in state institutions had to have a clear secular purpose.
So both sides
are appealing to the Supreme Court, in an action joined by the state
of Alabama, whose senate recently approved (unanimously) a proposed
amendment to the state constitution permitting display of the Ten
Commandments on public property. Court cases and legislation of
that character are pending in a half-dozen other states.
To formulate
an agenda requires some attention to priorities. The first, surely,
is the mental health of William A. Books. Is he in a sanatorium?
Or was he given treatment in time? Can he still ride his bicycle,
or is doing so too keen a reminder of the kind of thing one can
run into, when riding a bicycle recklessly about? Will the court
order damages for Mr. Books?
And Mr. Books
has a provincial ally. He is Michael Suetkamp, an Elkhart factory
worker. Suetkamp is in the best tradition of the conciliator, and
there are those in Elkhart who think of him as in the tradition
of the Missouri Compromise. The Suetkamp Ordinance: remove the Ten
Commandments slab to "a museum or an art exhibit." Or
— Suetkamp's broad range of thought is here in evidence —
construct a companion monument celebrating "the deep and rich
history of atheism." If that were done, Elkhart might go on
and create a bicycle path past the next atheism statue, guaranteeing
Mr. Books safe passage in the park.
The origin
of that fuss was an experience of the Minnesota judge who approached
Mr. DeMille back in 1956. Judge Ruegemer had had an experience in
juvenile court. A 16-year-old boy was brought in charged with reckless
driving. The judge mentioned the Ten Commandments and was stunned
to hear the miscreant ask, "What are they?" The judge
sentenced the reckless driver to "learn and keep the Ten Commandments
as a condition of probation." One thing led to another and
the Fraternal Order of Eagles organization, with its membership
of nearly 1 million, served as the irrigation system through which
the Ten Commandments, variously depicted, were sent abroad.
To do the Lord's
work?
Well, we are
not allowed to put it that way. To do Cecil B. DeMille's work.
Was Cecil B.
DeMille doing the Lord's work?
Conceivably.
If a viewer of the movie resolved never again to take the Lord's
name in vain, or to dishonor his father and mother, or to kill or
steal or commit adultery or covet his neighbor's goods, then it
might be said that his behavior was influenced by his exposure to
the Ten Commandments, an exposure — on wide screen — more
vivid than that on a granite slab in Elkhart, Indiana. And of course
the question before the house, really, is whether an injunction
to good behavior is exclusively a religious concern. The real threat,
as seen by the ACLU, is that religious behavior might give secular
behavior a bad name, and that is, surely, unconstitutional.
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