Religious Insecurity

What is it about one's faith (or indeed the faith of any group of people) that compels them to remind themselves wherever they go that there are 10 commandments by which to live? Are they that insecure?

Tomorrow the US Supreme Court is poised to hear arguments on why the 10 Commandments should or should not be allowed to be displayed on public buildings. Here are the arguments.

Against:

"There is no secular purpose in placing on government property a monument declaring 'I am the Lord thy God,' " Prof. Erwin Chemerinsky of Duke University Law School wrote in his brief for Thomas Van Orden, an Austin resident who has so far been unsuccessful in his challenge to the Texas monument. It is one of thousands placed around the country in the 1950's and 1960's by the Fraternal Order of Eagles with the support of Cecil B. DeMille, the director, who was promoting his movie "The Ten Commandments."

"The government is not supposed to be for religion or against religion," Douglas Laycock, a professor and associate dean at the University of Texas School of Law, said in a discussion of the cases here on Thursday sponsored by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. "You don't put up a sign you disagree with, and the government doesn't disagree with these."

For:

At the same event, Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, a law firm established by the Rev. Pat Robertson that litigates for evangelicals and other religious communities, offered a different perspective. The Ten Commandments have acquired secular as well as religious meaning, he said, and have come to be "uniquely symbolic of law.

Oh, and that's why they want the 10 Commandments there, for a secular purpose. Riiiight. Can someone please explain again the secular peurpose of having sacred religious documents on permanent display in federal buildings?