WASHINGTON - The U.S. Supreme Court said Tuesday it will hear arguments in two cases that could determine whether government displays of the Ten Commandments are permissible.
While neither case is directly related to the controversy over Roy Moore's Ten Commandment monument in Alabama, the justices could settle the confusion caused by lower court decisions that have allowed some displays but not others.
The court early next year will consider Ten Commandments displays on the grounds of the Texas state Capitol and inside Kentucky courthouses. For years, the justices have turned away such cases, including that of former Alabama Chief Justice Moore's monument in Montgomery.Tuesday's announcement thrusts the court into the center of a hot political issue.
It could be a blockbuster religious liberty case, said Mathew Staver of the conservative law group Liberty Counsel, who represents the Kentucky counties that displayed the Commandments.
"It's finally here," he said.
At issue is whether the displays are an affront to the separation of church and state. While proponents of the displays argue they simply acknowledge the role of religion in western law, opponents say they are an inappropriate endorsement by government of a particular religion.
Bills pending in Congress, sponsored by Sen. Richard Shelby and Rep. Robert Aderholt of Alabama, would protect Ten Commandments displays by making the issue off-limits to federal judges. Until then, however, the U.S. Supreme Court has jurisdiction to settle such First Amendment questions.
A decision is likely next spring or summer.
Defiance another issue:
Alabama's case, in which a federal judge ordered a massive stone monument of the Commandments removed from the state judicial building, was an unlikely candidate for Supreme Court review, experts say. The justices let the decision stand without comment last November, handing Moore another legal defeat in his crusade to make the Commandments a focus of Alabama's legal system.
"His case was notorious and extreme," said Ira Lupu, a professor at the George Washington University Law School in Washington. "It got very wide publicity, partly because of his defiance of the court order. I'd imagine the Supreme Court didn't want to add any extra dignity to a case already involved with the defiance of a federal court."
The granite monument on the Texas Capitol grounds has been there since 1961; officials in the Kentucky counties hung framed copies of the Commandments and, after being challenged in court, added other historical documents, such as the Magna Carta. In that regard, the circumstances are different from those in Moore's case. He made the Ten Commandments the dominant focal point of the state judicial building and acknowledged he was doing it for religious purposes.
Avoiding Moore's point:
A spokesman for Americans United for Separation of Church and State said the Supreme Court's announcement Tuesday would not affect Moore's situation.
"He had his shot. What he did was so plainly unconstitutional; it was really open and shut," said Rob Boston. "These new controversies are more nuanced."
The Supreme Court also recently turned down Moore's attempts to get his job back, which he lost when he ignored the federal court order to remove the monument.
Moore said Tuesday that the Texas and Kentucky cases avoid the key issue of the right of public officials to acknowledge God. By choosing those cases over his, Moore said, "they put themselves above the law and above God."
"These other monuments ... (in Texas and Kentucky) both are surrounded by monuments or artifacts or historical documents to relegate God to a historical concept," Moore said. "In other words, that God is relevant to our history but not to our present tense."