Theocracy Watch

This one's for Gene's sake. A judge in Alabama has embroidered the Ten Commandments onto his robe. His predictable defender, the ex-judge Roy Moore who disgraced himself by attempting to install a Ten Commandments monolith on the grounds of his courthouse, had this to say:

"I applaud Judge McKathan. It is time for our judiciary to recognize the moral basis of our law," Moore said.

This is nothing so sophisticated as natural law theory. The "moral basis of our law," it seems, is a decalogue revealed by God directly to his prophet, utterly inaccessible to reason or analysis.

Defenders of including the Ten Commandments in the public square love to point to its prohibition against murder, stealing, and lying, and proclaim, as Moore does anywhere he can get an audience, "Behold, our founding principles." That's bollocks. The first four commandments are dogma without so much as a fiber of moral teaching to them: 1) Yahweh is God; 2) Worship Yahweh, don't worship idols; 3) Don't say "Yahweh" out loud (it's a bit like saying "Bloody Mary" or "Candyman," as Rabbi Akibah once remarked); 4) Don't work on Saturdays.

Edifying moral lessons, no? The situation improves somewhat at 5) Honor your father and mother. But it declines all over again when you read a bit past the Charlton Heston on the mountain scene and find out that the penalty for disrespecting one's parents is death. (But the Constitution might allow that, since if it's in the Bible, it's not cruel or unusual, by definition. Gun rights are definitely an indispensable freedom, though, right Gene?)

Then there's the all important 6) Thou shalt not kill, which actually isn't all that helpful, as the intellectual history of just war theory seems to demonstrate. Do we really owe our prohibition against murder to this one line in Exodus? Really? So the commonality of a prohibition against unlawful killing to every culture from the proto-Indo-European clans of the ancient steppes to the cannibalistic tribes of Polynesia doesn't count as evidence that the causal history of the prohibition against murder isn't so clear-cut, or that the single line in Exodus wasn't quite a sine qua non? No? Okay, just checking.

Number 7) Thou shalt not commit adultery. Well that's totalitarian.

Number 8) Thou shalt not steal. Same as with murder, only none of the intuitions are as strong.

Number 9) Don't lie or slander. This one I may have to concede. The intuition we all feel when someone lies about us must come from the Bible. Where else could it come from? Unfortunately, unless we're talking about perjury or libel, we're talking about something the law is powerless to punish.

Number 10) Don't covet things that don't belong to you, like your neighbor's ox or slave or wife. As George Carlin says, this is just bad for the economy.

I'm not trying to be flippant (well, not exactly), but for all the bluster about the "moral foundation of law," I have yet to hear a single example of a law premised on the Ten Commandments.