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| This statue of Baphomet is looking for a home and Arkansas is on the list. |
Thus marking a milestone in a process that has caused a great deal of debate in Arkansas where the separation of church and state should be. Historically speaking, a Ten Commandments Monument would be a violation of it.
Not that lawmakers don't try.
Oklahoma famously passed a law allowing for privately-funded religious monuments on the state capitol grounds. The kicker was, that it was open to all religions as long as they could afford to pay for their own monuments.
This backfired on them when the Temple of Satan did just that.
Of course, the Ten Commandments in Oklahoma came down pretty fast after lawmakers learned there was no way to stop the Temple of Satan to put up a monument of its own on state capitol grounds. After all, it was open to all relgions.
In Arkansas, state lawmakers are trying to avoid what happened in Oklahoma by proclaiming that the Ten Commandments monument is not a religious monument. The argument that is being used is “the Ten Commandments aren't a religious document, but the historical foundation of our laws.”
The Arkansas Ten Commandment Display Act states:
“The Ten Commandments represent a philosophy of government held by many of the founders of this nation and by many Arkansans and other Americans today, that God has ordained civil government and has delegated limited authority to civil government, that God has limited the authority of civil government, and that God has endowed people with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;
“In order that they may understand and appreciate the basic principles of the American system of government, the people of the United States of America and of the State of Arkansas need to identify the Ten Commandments, one of many sources, as influencing the development of what has 5 become modern law;
“The placing of a monument to the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the Arkansas State Capitol would help the people of the United States and of the State of Arkansas to know the Ten Commandments as the moral foundation of the law.”
The problem is that the Ten Commandments are mostly religious and moral rules, not the foundation of Western law. Even the Act itself sounds religious in nature as it makes mention of God, divine endowments and morality — none of those things that most people believe that the state should be involved in.
“What?” you might say. “But every elected official says they are historical!”
Well, that may be so but the thing about elected officials is that they often tell people what they want to hear, especially if it's their base. In Arkansas, as well as most of the South, religious voters are a very big base, if not the biggest. Their support is what keeps many lawmakers in office. Things like the Ten Commandments Monument makes the more fundamentalist-leaning voters happy.
The problem is, most of the things on there aren't crimes, nor were they crimes in the times of the Founding Fathers of the U.S.
Of the Ten Commandments, there are only three that are actually crimes: Thou shall not murder, steal or bear false witness. The rest are basically good advice (don't cheat on your spouse, don't be a jealous jerk) or rules pertaining to practicing the faith (no graven images, no taking God's name in vein) which almost all self-proclaimed religious folks break on a daily basis anyway.
On top of all that, of the things that are actually illegal in the Ten Commandments, all of them were illegal before Judaism and Christianity had their respective boom periods in the Mediterranean region, which is pretty much the cradle of Western civilization.
Chances are, those things were probably fit for some sort of punishment even before the time of writing. But it's one figure, Hammurabi, that made the law famous.
Hammurabi, who lived from 1810 BC to 1750 BC. He was the sixth king of the First Babylonian Dynasty, reigning from 1792 BC to 1750 BC. Written in stone, his famous code had 252 laws. Among them were rules against stealing, murder and bearing false witness. Also among them is the famous “eye for an eye” rule.
The punishment called for by Hammurabi's Code was very uneven and depended on the perpetrator's social status. A poor perpetrator would always face harsher punishment, often death, while the rich criminal often paid only a fine.
Fortunately, no such uneven dispensation of justice exists in our society today. (For those of you that are a little dense, that's supposed to be sarcasm.)
But, even Hammurabi can't be given credit for first transcribing those three laws. He was late by a couple of hundred years. The first person, as far as we know, to actually have laws against murder, stealing and false witness transcribed is another Mesopotamian — Ur-Nammu, founder of the third Sumerian Dynasty. Ur-Nammu was believed to have lived around 2030 BC.
Moses' birthdate, on the other hand, is believed to have been around 1400 BC, hundreds of years after Hammurabi's and Ur-Nammu's deaths. By the time Moses came along, laws against murdering, lying and bearing false witness were not only standard across the region, but across the known world as well.
Thus there's just not a valid case that the Ten Commandments are the basis of Western law. By the time that the Romans started converting to Christianity, such laws were already put in place centuries before by polytheists.
Now one can try to make an argument that the Ten Commandments are the “moral” basis for Western law, but even after the the Christianization of the West, morality was a very flexible thing. After all, it's doubtful that Moses would approve of the Trinity, Saints, crosses or various iconography that we see in regards to Christianity today.
Other things, like coveting and honoring one's parents, have never really been addressed by Western law to any meaningful extent. Looking at the leaders of old, how many of them launched wars out of greed or dishonored their parents? A lot.
So where does that leave us?
It leaves us a system based on man's law. Our secular law is not only supposed to protect Christians, but hold them at equal footing with the likes of Muslims, Atheists and modern Pagans. If we let one or the other take control of the law, there'd be nothing for anyone else.
Sen. Rapert might want to take this into consideration. After all, he's one of the beneficiaries of secular law, which allowed for his ancestors to pass their faith onto him. If the U.S. was founded on religion, it's possible he wouldn't be following the “right” form of it.
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