Monday, August 18, 2003

It might not be the moral equivalent of standing in the schoolhouse door to prevent enforcement of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision desegregating public schools, but the legal issue is the same. Can a state official ignore the interpretation of the U.S. Constitution adopted by a federal court?

Roy Moore, the chief justice of Alabama's Supreme Court, seems to think so. The chief justice has refused to comply with a federal judge's order, upheld by an appeals court, that he remove a 5,300-pound Ten Commandments monument from the rotunda of the state's judicial building in Montgomery.

The court set a deadline of Aug. 20 for the dismantling of the monument, which the chief justice -- fulfilling an election campaign pledge -- had erected in 2001.

Chief Justice Moore also says he will appeal the order to the U.S. Supreme Court, which is his right. He also has the right to ask the high court to stay the effect of the lower court ruling until it takes the case. But if the chief justice goes further and defies a legal order, he will be reminding Alabamians -- and the rest of the nation -- of an era when Southern public officials resisted other federal court orders.

The controversy in Alabama is only one of many around the country involving the display of the Ten Commandments on government property.

Allegheny County recently dodged a lawsuit over an 85-year-old Ten Commandments plaque on the Courthouse after a federal appeals court rejected a First Amendment claim in a similar case involving a Ten Commandments display in Chester County.

We supported county Chief Executive Jim Roddey in his assertion that the Ten Commandments plaque on the Courthouse was part of the building's architectural heritage. The same cannot be said of the Ten Commandments display in Alabama, which is only two years old.

In upholding a lower-court judge's finding that the display violated the First Amendment, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said: "If we adopted his position, the chief justice would be free to adorn the walls of the Alabama Supreme Court's courtroom with sectarian religious murals and have decidedly religious quotations painted above the bench. Every government building could be topped with a cross or a menorah or a statue of Buddha, depending upon the views of the officials with authority over the premises."

But the important issue in Alabama isn't the proper interpretation of the First Amendment; it is whether the states of the Union can ignore the rulings of federal courts. Roy Moore may not be George Wallace, but his defiant attitude is reminiscent of that other Alabamian.

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