MOSES IN ALABAMA.(removal of Ten Commandmants sculpture from an Alabama courtroom )(reading the law of church and state)(Column)

In 1802, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to the Danbury Baptists--the letter in which he introduced the metaphor of "a wall of separation between Church and State"--that he was convinced that man "has no natural right in opposition to his social duties." It is the Enlightenment world view in a nutshell, the faith behind the Declaration of Independence's shocking idea that governments are instituted to preserve the God-given rights of their citizens. This belief that spiritual values can run on all fours with civic duty, that the good, in the end, maps perfectly onto the just, has been supremely inspiring in the abstract, and the source of endless trouble in the everyday.

The removal, last week, from the rotunda of the Alabama Supreme Court Building of the huge rock engraved with the Ten Commandments that had been placed there surreptitiously two years earlier by the court's Chief Justice, Roy Moore, brought to a close one chapter, though possibly not the final chapter, in a kind of fundamentalist "Walking Tall." Chief Justice Moore (now suspended from his office), with his pre-judicial experience as a military policeman, full-contact karate expert, and professional kickboxer, is not, in fact, a bad stand-in for the legendary Buford Pusser. Moore did not elect to identify himself with Buford Pusser, however; he elected to identify himself with Martin Luther King, Jr. The claim seemed to many people the delusional high point of what was already being treated, outside Alabama, as a fairly farcical crusade. Roy Moore is no Martin Luther King; he is, as a number of commentators have justly called him, a demagogue. He is not an enemy of prejudice and intolerance; he is prejudice's inflamer. But, if the invocation of Dr. King is any measure, he is not stupid.

"If we are wrong," King cried in 1955, in the great speech to the Montgomery bus boycotters in the Holt Street Baptist Church which launched his career as a civil-rights leader, "the Constitution of the United States is wrong." His next line got more cheers. "If we are wrong," he said, "God Almighty is wrong." It was King's genius to see that in the matter of racial equality the teachings of the Christian Bible are on all fours with the promise of the Constitution and its amendments, that the principles of justice considered spiritually (we are all God's children) are identical to the principles of justice considered legally (every citizen is entitled to equal protection under the law). With one brilliant stroke, he transformed what had been a legal struggle into a spiritual one, and lost nothing in the bargain.

Roy Moore and his defenders and apologists have been advancing the same argument--that God's laws (the Christian God's, that is) are the foundation for, and are therefore entirely congruous with, man-made American law. As a national platitude, at the "In God We Trust" level of things, this seems unexceptionable to everyone except those who might be called card-carrying atheists, people who become litigious every time they hear a reference to God in a public place. What makes the Roy's Rock story so bizarre, though, is that the Justice's chosen symbol completely subverts the point it is supposed to make. Of the Bible's Ten Commandments, only two (VI and VIII) proscribe activities that secular law regards as criminal. It is not illegal in the United States to: have another god before Yahweh; manufacture graven images (for instance, pieces of granite with Scriptural texts carved on them); say "God damn it" when you spill the ketchup; go to "Terminator 3" on ...