It was bad enough that on June 26, a day that will live in infamy, the US Supreme Court rammed same-sex marriage down the throats of righteous Christians, but just four days later the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled by a 7-2 margin in the case of Prescott et al. v. Oklahoma Capitol Preservation Commission that the Ten Commandments monument that was placed on the state capital grounds in 2012 has got to go. (I had not been aware that someone drove a car into the old monument last November and wrecked it and a new one was constructed and put up this January.)
Needless to say, conservatives are reeling from this latest legal whammy and issued the usual call for the judges to be impeached and/or the constitution to be changed.
You may recall that this monument had been much in the news because the Satanic Temple demanded that if it was allowed, then their own statue of Baphomet should also be allowed on the capital grounds. Then a Hindu group expressed a wish to put up a statue of Hanuman. The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster also expressed interest in having a presence. But rather than welcome an abundance of religiosity that would undoubtedly make the good people of Oklahoma even more spiritual, the state enforced a moratorium on new monuments and they were sued and now have to remove the monument.
Lucien Greaves, co-founder of the Satanic Temple, was interviewed on Fox News about why he co-founded the Satanic Temple and this latest development.
Greaves explained to Megyn Kelly why they had proposed to have their own monument there if the Ten Commandments were allowed. When Kelly said that the US Supreme Court had allowed the Ten Commandments in some public spaces, Greaves pointed out correctly that that was irrelevant since the decision to expel the monument had been made on the basis of Article 2, Section 5 of Oklahoma’s state constitution that stated:
No public money or property shall ever be appropriated, applied, donated, or used, directly or indirectly, for the use, benefit, or support of any sect, church, denomination, or system of religion, or for the use, benefit, or support of any priest, preacher, minister, or other religious teacher or dignitary, or sectarian institution as such.
In fact, in its brief opinion, the Oklahoma Supreme Court went out of its way to state that the Establishment Clause of the US constitution had nothing to do with this case because the issue being raised was whether the monument violated the state constitution and that it plainly did.
Kelly said that she is a lawyer and had looked at both the state and federal constitutions and thinks they should result in similar rulings because she saw “a lot of similar words”. That is a truly ingenious way of making legal judgments (“Hey, why don’t we just count the number of similar words”) and one wonders why Kelly has not already been nominated to the Supreme Court.
Counting the number of similar words -- so they are going to use sequence alignment algorithms? Of course this method can easily ignore small words like ‘no’ and ‘not’.
At 2:30:
Keep at it, Megyn! In time, you’ll get the hang of it.
If they wanted to do what Oklahomans want, can’t they just amend their constitution to get rid of that section? Lazy bastards.
doublereed,
GOP lawmakers are already working on it
http://www.okcfox.com/story/29485313/state-lawmakers-file-for-constitutional-amendment-following-ten-commandments-ruling
Yea, I figured. It looks like it requires a general election vote to ratify, so that sounds reasonably difficult to get anyone to care about it.
The scaremongering is rather silly considering it’s the status quo, not a change. I doubt that will resonate.
The Supreme Court’s ruling utilizing the relevant section of the OK State Constitution has, in effect, validated the constitutionality of that section. Any attempt to nullify that section would surely be in conflict and therefore subject to critical review and probable failure.
Better go with what you got! It’s worked up to now.