{"id":322,"date":"2011-07-28T10:39:25","date_gmt":"2011-07-28T14:39:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/catholicbychoice\/?p=322"},"modified":"2011-07-28T10:39:25","modified_gmt":"2011-07-28T14:39:25","slug":"religious-cleansing-judge-orders-removal-of-the-ten-commandments-outside-of-florida-courthouse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/catholicbychoice\/2011\/07\/religious-cleansing-judge-orders-removal-of-the-ten-commandments-outside-of-florida-courthouse.html","title":{"rendered":"Religious Cleansing: Judge Orders Removal of the Ten Commandments Outside of Florida Courthouse"},"content":{"rendered":"<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Ten commandments statue ordered from court house entrance\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/c_D6I1iHpiY?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<p>On July 15, 2011 the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida ordered that a large Ten Commandments monument &#8211; paid for privately by a local businessman and displayed since 2006 &#8211; be removed within thirty days from the front steps of the Courthouse.<\/p>\n<p>Mat Staver, the founder and chairman of The Liberty Counsel, Dean and Professor of law at Liberty University School of Law and Director of the Liberty Center for Law and Policy, represented those who defended the display of the Ten Commandments outside of the Courthouse in Florida. He is a good lawyer and a good and courageous man. His legal position was correct.<\/p>\n<p>The Court explained how they viewed the issue in these words, &#8220;whether a five-foot, six-ton granite monument on the front steps of the Dixie County courthouse, displaying the Ten Commandments as well as directing all viewers to &#8220;LOVE GOD AND KEEP HIS COMMANDMENTS,&#8221; violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.&#8221; Then, in a confusing opiion, simply decided that it somehow did. They were in error.<a href=\"https:\/\/wp-media.beliefnet.com\/sites\/72\/2011\/07\/ten-commandments-newest-3-INSIDE.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-323\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.beliefnet.com\/sites\/72\/2011\/07\/ten-commandments-newest-3-INSIDE.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"250\" height=\"341\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The Court\u00a0 awarded one dollar to the ACLU in nominal damages. Howard Simon, the executive director of the ACLU of Florida said to a local paper, &#8220;We hope that Dixie County officials will find a permanent place for it at a church or other house of worship, which is the appropriate place for religious monuments.&#8221;\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Mat Staver is the founder and chairman of The Liberty Counsel, Dean and Professor of law at Liberty University School of Law and the Director of the Liberty Center for Law and Policy. He represented those who defended the display of the Ten Commandments outside of the Courthouse in Florida. He is a good lawyer and a good and courageous man. Furthermore, he is correct both from a moral and a legal perspective in this case and intends to appeal the matter.<\/p>\n<p>He responded to the loss with these words, &#8220;This is only the first step in a march to the United States Supreme Court. Since 2005, we have won every Ten Commandments case except one. We are ready to return to the Supreme Court. The ACLU has shown in three separate losses at the court of appeals that they have lost the High Court on this issue and they are reluctant to return.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>On Monday January 4, 2011, a three judge panel of the United States 9th Circuit Court of Appeals filed its opinion in the &#8220;Mount Soledad Cross Case&#8221;, Trunk v. City of San Diego. Those black robed justices held that the Mount Soledad cross which had stood since 1913 had somehow now become a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.<\/p>\n<p>All who are concerned about religious freedom in the United States should watch these cases, and others like them,\u00a0 with great concern.\u00a0 As a constitutional lawyer I have long questioned the current establishment clause law in our Nation. In 1992 I wrote a law review article entitled &#8220;In the Wake of Weisman: The Lemon Test is Still a lemon but the Psycho-coercion Test is more bitter Still&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>In that article, after tracing the history of the interpretation of the Establishment clause of the First Amendment to the US Constitution and the developments of the last few decades, I predicted the insanity that would follow from the efforts of the Supreme Court to apply the so called &#8220;Lemon Rule&#8221; (named after the Courts 1971 opinion in Lemon v Kurtzman) and it&#8217;s ever expanding &#8220;interpretations&#8221; and permutations. Insanity is precisely what has occurred.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>We are experiencing a judicial ping pong game; incomprehensible opinions requiring a showing that religious symbols have a &#8220;secular&#8221; purpose &#8211; as though religion and the common good are mutually exclusive. Federal Judges make up their own rules by which they decide whether a religious symbol will be allowed to stand on public land or in a public building. There is not even a pretense that the actual words of the Establishment Clause have any effect in this new world of the judicial oligarchy.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/wp-media.beliefnet.com\/sites\/72\/2011\/07\/ten-commandments-newest-3-156-x-110.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-324\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.beliefnet.com\/sites\/72\/2011\/07\/ten-commandments-newest-3-156-x-110.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"156\" height=\"110\" \/><\/a>The Establishment Clause is best understood as an &#8220;anti-establishment&#8221; clause. It was intended to prohibit the &#8220;establishment&#8221; of one particular religion &#8211; in the sense of a Federal or State sponsored Church which mandated adherence from unwilling citizens. The American founders fled coercive approaches to religion which compelled adherence to a particular sect. Yet, they were not anti-religious.<\/p>\n<p>They were assuredly not against religious symbols or religious expression. Our history is filled with them. Or, more accurately, it once was. Religious symbols are no longer seen as a wonderful sign of the history of the West and the American founding by the new Judicial Oligarchs. Rather they are seen as a threat to the secularist order. When they are allowed they must be demonstrated to have been eviscerated of any religious meaning and somehow thereby rendered &#8220;secular&#8221; and acceptable.<\/p>\n<p>The U.S. Supreme Court handed down two opinions in &#8220;Ten Commandment cases&#8221; on June 27, 2005 which sent another convoluted message. The Justices (at least five of them) upheld a display of the Ten Commandments on public land if the display is placed within the context of other displays that speak to the history of the Nation. At least that seemed to be the practical result of the Texas case which involved the &#8220;constitutionality&#8221; of the placement of a six foot granite monument of the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol.<\/p>\n<p>However, the Court also held that some displays of those same commandments, with the very same content, cannot adorn the walls of a courthouse, at least if they look like ones which hung in Kentucky. It appears that if the Ten Commandments are placed within the context of other codes governing human behavior, such as they are in the display hung right in the U.S. Supreme Court, they may be permissible.<\/p>\n<p>The current state of &#8220;Establishment Law&#8221; Jurisprudence is abysmal. This was noted in a dissent in the case emanating from Kentucky where Justice Antonin Scalia wrote: &#8220;What distinguishes the rule of law from the dictatorship of a shifting Supreme Court majority is the absolutely indispensable requirement that judicial opinions be grounded in consistently applied principle.&#8221;\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>There are no discernible principles. The Chief Justice was also correct in his comment in the Texas case when he opined: &#8220;Of course, the Ten Commandments are religious &#8211; they were so viewed at their inception and so remain. The monument therefore has religious significance&#8230; Simply having religious content or promoting a message consistent with a religious doctrine does not run afoul of the Establishment clause.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The latest decision out of Gainesville, Florida is an example of growing governmental hostility toward religious faith and religious symbols in the public square. The effort to scrub the public square of such religious expression and symbols is a threat to religious freedom, runs contrary to our founding documents, and is unfaithful to our history as a free people. It also represents an incorrect application of the Establishment Clause, found in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. It is a form of religious cleansing which threatens the foundations of our freedom.<\/p>\n<p>This Florida opinion demonstrates that the 2005 Supreme Court decision of Van Orden v. Perry, a ten commandments case, made the illogic of current Establishment Clause Jurisprudence even more pronounced in the United States.\u00a0 Now, even the convoluted trail left by the Lemon case and its progeny can be abandoned by a Court, under the ruse of an &#8220;exception&#8221; to the Lemon analysis, only to be replaced by judicial whimsy.<\/p>\n<p>Federal Judges seem at times to make up their own rules by which they decide whether a religious symbol will be allowed to stand on public land or in a public building. There is not even a pretense that the actual words of the Establishment Clause have any effect in this new world of the judicial oligarchy. It is essential that we reclaim the &#8220;Separation of Powers&#8221; doctrine and rein in Federal Judges and Courts.<\/p>\n<p>Religious faith and the values informed by faith serve and promote the common good. Religious freedom is a fundamental and basic human right which must be secured and protected by law in truly free Nations. Rightly understood and applied, religious freedom means a freedom for religious expression; not a removal of such expression from public places.<\/p>\n<p>Efforts to remove the Ten Commandments reveal the current imbalance in our allegedly co-equal branches of government. They also point out the importance of judicial appointments and cry out for a new generation of lawyers. Religious cleansing is a threat to the future of all freedoms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On July 15, 2011 the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida ordered that a large Ten Commandments monument &#8211; paid for privately by a local businessman and displayed since 2006 &#8211; be removed within thirty days from the front steps of the Courthouse. Mat Staver, the founder and chairman of The&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":91,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[143,116,126,158,198,172,160,197,200,203,202,199,201,68,196],"tags":[206,1,204,13,205,262,2,261,260],"class_list":["post-322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christian-life","category-christian-living","category-christian-vote","category-citizenship-2","category-constituional-law","category-culture-war","category-election","category-establishment-clause","category-first-amendment","category-free-expression","category-free-speech","category-religious-expression","category-religious-freedom","category-social-justice","category-ten-commandments","tag-aclu","tag-catholic","tag-constituion","tag-deacon-keith-fournier","tag-firstamendment","tag-free-speech","tag-freedom","tag-religious-freedom","tag-ten-commandments"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Religious Cleansing: Judge Orders Removal of the Ten Commandments Outside of Florida Courthouse - Catholic by Choice<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"noindex, nofollow\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Religious Cleansing: Judge Orders Removal of the Ten Commandments Outside of Florida Courthouse - Catholic by Choice\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"On July 15, 2011 the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida ordered that a large Ten Commandments monument &#8211; paid for privately by a local businessman and displayed since 2006 &#8211; be removed within thirty days from the front steps of the Courthouse. Mat Staver, the founder and chairman of The&hellip;\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/catholicbychoice\/2011\/07\/religious-cleansing-judge-orders-removal-of-the-ten-commandments-outside-of-florida-courthouse.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Catholic by Choice\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2011-07-28T14:39:25+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/catholicbychoice\/files\/2011\/07\/ten-commandments-newest-3-INSIDE.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Deacon Keith Fournier\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Religious Cleansing: Judge Orders Removal of the Ten Commandments Outside of Florida Courthouse - Catholic by Choice","robots":{"index":"noindex","follow":"nofollow"},"og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Religious Cleansing: Judge Orders Removal of the Ten Commandments Outside of Florida Courthouse - Catholic by Choice","og_description":"On July 15, 2011 the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida ordered that a large Ten Commandments monument &#8211; paid for privately by a local businessman and displayed since 2006 &#8211; be removed within thirty days from the front steps of the Courthouse. 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He is a widely recognized voice in the Catholic and broader Christian community. He is a member of the Clergy of the Diocese of Richmond, Virginia. In his fifteenth year of service as an ordained Catholic Deacon, he is currently assigned to St Stephen Martyr Parish in Chesapeake, Virginia. He is also authorized to serve the Liturgy of the Greek Byzantine Melkite Catholic Church. Deacon Fournier and his wife Laurine have been married for 34 years and have five grown children and six grandchildren. Deacon Fournier holds his Bachelors degree in theology and philosophy from the Franciscan University of Steubenville (BA), his Masters Degree in Marriage and Family Theology from the John Paul II Institute of the Lateran University (MTS), his Juris Doctor Law Degree Law (JD) from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and is a PhD candidate in Moral Theology at the Catholic University of America where he is currently writing his Doctoral Dissertation. Deacon Fournier also holds two honorary Doctorates, a Doctor of Laws (L.L.D. 1994,Honoris Causa) from St. Thomas University - Given for pro-life legal contributions, and a Doctor of Divinity Degree (D.D. 2005, Honoris Causa ) from the National Clergy Council and the Methodist Episcopal Church for his contributions to authentic ecumenical efforts toward Christian unity. Attorney Fournier is a constitutional lawyer who appeared as co-counsel in cases before the United States Supreme Court on Pro-Life, Religious Freedom and Pro-family issues. He served as the first Executive Director of the American Center for Law and Justice for seven years. He then served as a public policy activist for the causes of life, marriage and family issues for a number of years. He has extensive experience in nonprofit and for profit leadership. He has taught at the College level and served in Academic administration. He was a Dean of Students and the Dean of Evangelization at the Franciscan University of Steubenville in Steubenville, Ohio. Deacon Fournier is, above all, a communicator. His faith informs his passion to share the fullness of life which he has found in the heart of the Catholic Church. He has written eight books on matters of faith, family and the Christian life and is widely published in the broader Christian community on matters of life, faith, family, and cultural and social issues. He hosted two daily national radio programs, Purpose for Living, and Millennial Moment. He hosted several television series on Christian family and contemporary faith issues on EWTN (Eternal Word Television Network). He is actively involved in preaching and teaching in the Catholic Church and the broader Christian community. In addition to serving as the Editor in Chief of Catholic Online, Deacon Fournier is the John Paul II Fellow and special counsel for the National Pro-Life Center in Washington, D.C. and is the president of Third Millennium, LLC, a communications and consulting company. He views his role on Beliefnet as an opportunity to share his Catholic Christian faith in what he calls a new areopagus. The areopagus is referred to in the 17th Chapter of the Acts of the Apostles in the Christian New Testament. Also called Mars Hill it was there where the Apostle Paul shared the Christian faith with the early Greeks in their temple.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/catholicbychoice\/author\/deaconfournier"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/catholicbychoice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/catholicbychoice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/catholicbychoice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/catholicbychoice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/91"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/catholicbychoice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=322"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/catholicbychoice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":326,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/catholicbychoice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322\/revisions\/326"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/catholicbychoice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/catholicbychoice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/catholicbychoice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}