THE COMMANDMENT FOLLIES

As long as we're looking at the issue of Alabama's Ten Commandments, my staff of thousands thought you might find an old Wall Street Journal story relevant. Unfortunately, it's not online except by subscription. The headline on the story, when it ran in the print edition in April 2001, gives you the gist of it: "When Moses' Laws Run Afoul of the U.S.'s, Get Me Cecil B. deMille -- Ten Commandment Memorial Has Novel Defense In Suit: It Was a Granite Movie Poster."

The tale by reporter Jess Bravin chronicled the twisty legal debate over a 6-foot-tall, 2,500 pound granite replica of the tablets Moses received on Mount Sinai, which stood before the Municipal Building in the northern Indiana factory town of Elkhart. (The monolith was moved in 2002 to a privately owned site.)

One of the fascinating points Bravin made was that "Thanks to an alliance between the Hollywood producer and a juvenile-court judge from St. Cloud, Minn., as many as 4,000 Ten Commandments monoliths were erected in public spaces across the country, for the dual pupose of promoting [deMille's] 1956 epic ["The Ten Commandments"] and instructing the citizenry in behavior acceptable to God."

There were, in 2001, pending court cases and legislation involving displays of the law of Moses in more than a half-dozen states, Bravin reported.

Not so incidentally, today's Wall Street Journal has a piece by none other than Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy S. Moore, the man at the center of the latest controversy. The piece has to be among the stupidest op-eds ever to run in the Journal's editorial pages -- and that's no mean feat. It's called "In God I Trust" (online only for WSJ subscribers), and it's riddled with legal and factual errors, among them the false claim that God is "specifically mentioned" in the U.S. Constitution. He is not. But Justice Moore's confusion may be understandable, since He is "specifically mentioned" in the Constitution of the Confederate States of America.