Roy Moore's monument: religion has a place in the public square--but not an exclusive one.

• Author: Young, Cathy
• Position: Columns

IN THE PERENNIAL debates about church-state entanglement, I have often argued against the strict separationists--those who regard any religious expression within a public institution as tantamount to government-sanctioned religion.

This rigid interpretation of the establishment clause has led to fairly obvious discrimination against religious beliefs and in favor of secular ones, and to the suppression of religious speech. State universities have denied funding to student publications with religious content; high school valedictorians have been forbidden to mention God in graduation speeches; a first-grader was not allowed to participate in a classroom reading exercise because he had selected a text from a book of Bible stories.

Given such practices, many conservatives' complaints about militant secularists seeking to banish God from the public square seemed reasonable enough.

These days, though, there is so much God in the public square that you can hardly take a step without bumping into him, or at least his militant champions. And increasingly, I find myself on the other side of the divide.

Maybe the last straw was the Ten Commandments--or rather, the 5,000-pound granite sculpture of them installed in the Alabama State Judicial Building by the state Supreme Court's Chief Justice, Roy Moore. Maybe it was the spectacle of Moore playing the martyr before the cameras when he defied a federal court order to remove the monument. Or maybe it was the conservative pundits earnestly claiming that the Ten Commandments do not represent a specific religion but rather general morality, or else the "Judeo-Christian philosophy" (apparently somehow distinct from religion) that is the bedrock of our laws.

Some of Moore's defenders have indignantly pointed out that the United States Supreme Court building has a frieze depicting Moses with the two tablets of the Ten Commandments. But that proves only that, in fact, current legal doctrine does not prohibit all mention of God or all things Judeo-Christian in public spaces. It's all in the context: On the Supreme Court frieze, Moses appears in the company of history's other lawgivers, such as Confucius and Hammurabi.

In other courthouses, Ten Commandments plaques are featured along with historical documents such as the Magna Carta. "Roy's Rock," as the Alabama monument came to be known, loomed majestically alone as a symbol of Judeo-Christian supremacy--a symbol meant, in Moore's words, to convey the message...