Jeff Rosen on the Ten Commandments

The New Republic's Supreme Court writer, law professor Jeffrey Rosen, has a nice essay in the upcoming issue on the Ten Commandments case.  Though I don't think it quite right to say, as Rosen does, that "conservatives like Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and William Rehnquist . . . yearn to resurrect open state support for religion, including school prayer"; and though I am not as sure as Rosen is that the Religion Clause's touchstone is "neutrality" (or, I don't understand "neutrality" in the same way); I think Rosen's discussion is very helpful.  Here's the conclusion:

  As Europe confronts the growing threat of Islamic extremism, countries like France are attempting to denude the public square of all religious displays--for example, forbidding young Muslim girls from wearing headscarves as a threat to the secular state. But the French effort to crack down on even private religious speech is an expression of the same overzealous secularism that led the French revolutionaries of earlier times to smash the faces of carved saints in the cathedrals. There is a similar zealotry in the air in the United States, as radical separationists are attempting to cleanse the public square of even ceremonial acknowledgments of our religious history while radical supremacists yearn for open state support of religion. The Supreme Court should reject both extremist positions. By ruling that the Ten Commandments can be displayed as long as the state isn't attempting to endorse a particular view about the centrality of religion in American life, the Court may not satisfy secular liberals or social conservatives. But it could provide a model of a healthy relationship between church and state.

Rick