DAYTON, Tenn. (ABP) — The granite Ten Commandments monument that cost Alabama judge Roy Moore his job last year started a nationwide tour July 31 — beginning in a town famous for an earlier clash between the secular and sacred in public life.
The two-and-a-half-ton monument was mounted atop a flatbed truck parked squarely in front of the red brick courthouse in Dayton, Tenn., where a jury in 1925 found high-school instructor John Scopes guilty of violating Tennessee law by teaching evolution.
An estimated 75 people visited the display on the Dayton square. The crowd diminished when ceremonies shifted to the local high-school football field, then dropped to about 40 people when rain forced events inside the school gym.
A Houston-based veterans group transported the 5,280-lb. monument to this small town in southeastern Tennessee after taking it in mid-July from storage in the Alabama Judicial Building in Montgomery. While information about the monument's journey remains sketchy, organizers insist the tour will culminate in Washington, D.C., in October.
Plans call for the monument to visit various towns and cities across Tennessee the first week of August. June Griffin, a Dayton activist and the state coordinator for the Ten Commandments rallies, was unsure of the monument's itinerary after Tennessee but said organizers want to concentrate on “swing” states in the November presidential election.
After leaving Dayton, the monument traveled to the nearby rural town of Dunlap, Tenn., where Griffin estimated between 200 and 300 people attended events. A subsequent stop in Cookeville, Tenn., attracted some 500 people, Griffin said. Another stop is planned at 27,000-member Bellevue Baptist Church near Memphis, Tenn.
In 2001 Moore, then chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, had the monument secretly installed in the rotunda of the building that houses the court. A federal judge ruled the display — engraved with the Protestant King James translation of the biblical commandments — violated the First Amendment's ban on government support for religion, ordering Moore to remove it from the public area. Moore refused and eventually was himself removed from office.
The Ten Commandments tour is organized by the American Veterans in Domestic Defense. Jim Cabaniss, president of AVIDD, said the group's mission is to oppose America's internal foes, which he said includes activist courts. “The enemies of our Christian heritage are using our failed judicial system to run roughshod over our Christian heritage,” Cabaniss said. He added, “Judge Roy Moore knows what he's doing in this stand.”
Supporters of the tour see the Ten Commandments as the basis of American law and public morality.
“The Ten Commandments is married to the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights,” said local activist Griffin. Quoting leaders from America's past, she attributed to James Madison the declaration that “we have not built our republic on government — far from it — -but upon the Ten Commandments of almighty God, and man's ability to keep them.”
Griffin continued, “No other religion outside of the Bible religion will give you the Bill of Rights, which is … the key to the Constitution. There would be no Constitution without the Bill of Rights.”
The activist's daughter-in-law, Stacey Griffin, wept as she looked at the monument with her three children. “You can't . . . display the Ten Commandments,” she lamented, adding, “normal things are shunned for what's taking place in the courts.”
Glenn Moseley, a United Methodist pastor and president of the Dayton Ministerial Alliance, said during the monument ceremonies at the high school that the Ten Commandments not only anticipated modern law but represent a living moral voice. “God does still speak, and America must decide if they will listen,” Moseley said.
Outspoken Southern Baptist pastor Wiley Drake, an AVIDD member who helped plan the tour but was unable to attend the Dayton event, spoke to Associated Baptist Press by phone about the significance of the events. Drake, senior pastor of First Southern Baptist Church of Buena Park, Calif., likened Moore's monument to the biblical ark of the covenant, which the ancient Israelites carried into battle because they believed it assured divine guidance and protection.
At one point in Old Testament history, Israelite leaders sent to the Hebrew town of Shiloh for the ark because their enemies had defeated them. “We see Montgomery, Ala., . . . as Shiloh,” Drake said. “We see the ark of the covenant now being brought back to God's people.”
Meanwhile, the Montgomery lawyer who successfully fought to have the monument removed from the judicial building said he sees nothing wrong with Moore's supporters now taking the monument on tour.
“We think it is perfectly appropriate for a private group to take the Ten Commandments monument on a tour to promote its views, even if we happen to disagree with those positions,” Richard Cohen, president of the Montgomery-based Southern Poverty Law Center, wrote on the center's website. “What's wrong is for a public official, like former Chief Justice Roy Moore, to use the power of his office to promote his own religious beliefs.
“Religious proselytizing by private groups is the American way; proselytizing by a public official violates the Constitution,” Cohen continued.
Other opponents of Moore's campaign to display the Ten Commandments argued that the monument contradicts — not champions — the principles of American justice.
Moore's insistence on stationing the monument in the Alabama courthouse “was a very blatant example of religion's encroachment against government,” said attorney Larry Darby, an officer of the Atheist Law Center in Montgomery, who attended the Dayton tour launch. “It's supposed to be a building for all people, not just . . . Christians.”
The connection between the biblical Ten Commandments and American law is a subject of intense debate.
David Oedel, professor at Mercer University Law School in Macon, Ga., said the Old Testament legal code served as a context for the rules and principles that govern the modern United States. Because America's founders knew the Ten Commandments and respected their moral precepts, the commandments in a general sense formed a basis for the legal provisions the nation's first leaders created, Oedel said. “Many provisions of the Ten Commandments are clearly reflected in American law,” he said.
At the same time, Oedel was hesitant to establish too direct a link between the commandments and America's founding documents. The Ten Commandments and the Bill of Rights, for example, had different targets. “The Ten Commandments are directed . . . to the individual, to guide the individual's behavior,” Oedel pointed out. The Bill of Rights, he said, had a wider focus — the collective institutions of government.
Oedel warned against misinterpreting the controversy surrounding Moore and the Alabama monument. “I would not over-read this case to read that the courts are hostile to religious observance,” Oedel said.
The Mercer legal scholar said Moore was clearly aware that his insistence on the monument's presence in the state capital would cause friction. “This is an unusual case in that it arose out of an attempt to be so politically inflammatory,” Oedel said.
At the courthouse in Dayton, Joseph Hooper said he visited the controversial monument because of his Christian faith and his belief that America had a moral foundation that should be honored.
“I don't see how that the commandments themselves … have done any harm,” Hooper said. “We believe … in Christ that God's going to win out. And it's going to be to the benefit for all of us,” he added. “God loves everybody.”
— Photo available from Associated Baptist Press.
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