The Freedom From Religion Foundation is decrying Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita’s misguided effort to resurrect a Ten Commandments monument on the Statehouse lawn.
Rokita has announced that his office has filed a motion for summary judgment seeking to lift a decades-old federal court injunction preventing the placement of the biblical monument. The proposed display features the Ten Commandments alongside the Bill of Rights and the Preamble to the Indiana Constitution. A previous monument stood by itself on Statehouse grounds until it was damaged in 1991, and courts blocked its replacement in 2000.
It would be appropriate to display the Bill of Rights in the Capitol area — and its First Amendment shows why the Ten Commandments, particularly the first four, should not be placed on government property.
“The state of Indiana has no business telling citizens which gods to have, how many gods to have or whether to have any gods alone,” notes FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “The First Commandment directly contradicts our First Amendment.”
Rokita absurdly claims the monument represents the historical foundations of Indiana law and argues that recent Supreme Court decisions have undermined the legal basis for the original injunction. FFRF forcefully rejects this historically baseless claim.
As the U.S. Supreme Court itself has noted, the biblical edicts “do not confine themselves to arguably secular matters. … Rather, the first part of the commandments concerns the religious duties of believers: worshipping the Lord God alone, avoiding idolatry, not using the Lord’s name in vain, and observing the Sabbath Day. See Exodus 20:1-11; Deuteronomy 5:6-15.”
Rokita’s proposal also flagrantly violates Article 1 of Indiana’s Bill of Rights, which bars the government from interfering with “the rights of conscience” and guarantees “No preference shall be given, by law, to any creed, religious society, or mode of worship; and no man shall be compelled to attend, erect, or support, any place of worship, or to maintain any ministry, against his consent.”
The state/church watchdog maintains that Rokita should be defending the constitutional rights of all Indiana residents, not spending public resources promoting a religious code.” The attorney general’s theocratic actions in particular are a slap at religiously unaffiliated Hoosiers, who comprise 31 percent of the state population, higher than the national average. Indiana officials should respect the religious and nonreligious diversity of their constituents and leave the Ten Commandments where they belong: in houses of worship, religious institutions and private homes — not on government property.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with about 40,000 members nationwide, including more than 500 members in Indiana. FFRF’s purposes are to defend the constitutional principle of separation between church and state, and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
