DIVISIVE MEANING, "WE OPPOSE IT"

Judge Roy Moore's Lawless Battle (NY Times, 8/13/03)

There is a very serious principle at risk in Justice Moore's grandstanding. The federal Constitution applies to the states, and the federal courts are its ultimate interpreter. Justice Moore's desire to ignore the Constitution's mandates on the separation of church and state has an uncomfortable resemblance to the arguments Gov. George Wallace made when he mounted his stand in the "schoolhouse door" to block blacks from enrolling at the University of Alabama.

Justice Moore's disturbing crusade recently spread to Congress, where the House of Representatives attached an amendment to an appropriations bill that would ban the use of federal funds to enforce the order to remove the Ten Commandments monument. The Senate must make sure that this lawless provision does not find its way into the final bill, and members of both houses of Congress should make clear that this sort of attack on federal judicial power is unacceptable.

Attorney General John Ashcroft, the nation's highest law enforcement officer, has a special duty to stand up, as his predecessors did in the civil rights era, for the authority of the federal courts. But Justice Moore can spare the nation a divisive constitutional showdown, and himself further embarrassment, by announcing that he will obey the law.

there is, of course, no Constitutional mandate for the separation of church and state, nor any reason that a federal court should be able to tell Judge Moore to remove the monument, but it's the last sentence that's most hilarious: Brown v. Bd. of Ed. was a divisive constitutional showdown, should it have been dropped? Posted by Orrin Judd at August 13, 2003 8:35 AM