The Ten Commandments case

The always-engaging and delightfully snarky Dahlia Lithwick has an essay up at Slate about the oral arguments in the Supreme Court's current Ten Commandments case.  She opens with this:

Imagine a bunch of elderly, black-robed medieval clerics absorbed in a scholarly dialogue on the number of angels (better make that "secular" angels—candy stripers or maybe Hell's Angels) able to dance on the head of a pin. You'd have a good idea of how oral argument went this morning in the pair of cases involving displays of the Ten Commandments on state property.

I've always thought it was too bad that (a) "medieval" often functions in contemporary discourse as an epithet, and (b) that modern-day memory of the contributions and achievements of the medieval scholastics seems limited to their discussions (which, if I remember correctly, were much more intriguing and evocative than the "head of a pin" line suggests) about angels.  But I digress . . .  

Lithwick is right, in my view, to observe that the Court's doctrine dealing with public religious displays is a "mess."  "As a result," Lithwick notes, "the court spen[t] the morning sorting among the rubble of discarded tests—all smashed up like Moses' tablets—and deconstructing hopelessly narrow, fact-specific old case law."  What I find particularly interesting about her account is the extent to which the various players try to avoid (or, in Justice Scalia's case, embrace) the question whether we really want to say that "the Ten Commandments may be displayed on public property because they aren't really religious."  Of course they are.  It does not necessarily follow, though, that they may not be displayed in public or on public property.  And, whether or not religious Christians and Jews should want them displayed is another matter entirely.

Rick