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A Dangerous Man With Dangerous Ideas
By Doug Patton
December 2, 2002

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, as I contemplated the people and the things for whom and for which I am thankful, I had to include a dangerous man who fosters dangerous ideas and incites dangerous people to do dangerous things. Things like believing in moral absolutes and in the God who declares them so.

Had this dangerous man lived two and a quarter centuries ago, he likely would have joined a group of other dangerous radicals who met in Philadelphia to sign their names to a dangerous document that spoke of nature and of nature's God and acknowledged that each of us is endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. But this man was not one of the Founders of the Republic in 1776. He is the Chief Justice of the Alabama State Supreme Court in 2002. His name is Roy Moore, and he is dangerous because he promotes the same ideas in 21st Century America that were considered so seditious to the established order in 18th Century Colonial New England.

Judge Moore was a county court judge who became the overwhelming choice of Alabama voters in 2000 to be the new Chief Justice of their state Supreme Court (an elected position in Alabama) after he steadfastly refused to remove a plaque of the Ten Commandments from the wall of his county courtroom. Upon assuming his new duties as the highest official in the state's judiciary, Judge Moore proceeded to erect a 5,300-pound monument to the commandments in the rotunda of the state Supreme Court building.

The American Civil Liberties Union, always committed to protecting the populace from the truth, filed suit to have the monument removed, as they have in communities across the nation. ACLU attacks on public displays of the Ten Commandments have become more aggressive in recent years. And even though the commandments remain engraved on the face of the United States Supreme Court building in Washington, DC, numerous federal court rulings have ordered their removal elsewhere, as they did earlier this year in a Plattsmouth, Nebraska, public park where a monument has stood since 1966.

Contrary to what the ACLU would like us to believe, this fight is not about protecting us from a governmental establishment of religion. It is about altering our understanding of the roots of American jurisprudence. It is about a vicious attack on absolutes, wherein it is considered subversive to believe that the Ten Commandments form the basis of American Constitutional Law.

If the ACLU and their liberal friends on the courts can change the way we think about the origin of our laws, it has won a major victory in its battle to refute the basis for the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. We are either free human beings endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, bestowed on us by Him and Him alone, or we are just highly evolved animals with rights based only on the whims of the more powerful among us. Both things cannot be true.

Judge Moore has questioned whether any federal court has the power to override a State Supreme Court Chief Justice on any matter relating to that particular state. The greater question is whether our courts have become so filled with God-hating liberals that we can no longer get a fair ruling in a case such as this one.

Judge Moore has until December 18th to remove the monument. Based on his past stand on this issue, that is about as likely as a July blizzard in Mobile. This is a man who understands from where the concepts of right and wrong derive, acknowledges it and defies the establishment to challenge his actions. To the enemies of liberty, that makes him a very dangerous man indeed.