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USA, February 26, 2005: “Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst, Where there a’n’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst;” written by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) in “Mandalay.” A federal judge quoted Kipling’s verse in his 2002 decision supporting a 41-year-old monument of the Ten Commandments near the Texas capitol. The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear arguments this week in the same case. In a recent brief supporting removal of the monument, the Hindu American Foundation has taken issue with U.S. District Judge Harry Lee Hudspeth’s use of Kipling’s words. “The District Court failed to recognize that the world is smaller now,” wrote the Hindu organization in a brief it recently filed with the U.S. Supreme Court, “and there are many people in the Western District of Texas – and millions in the United States – for whom ‘there a’n’t no Ten Commandments.'” The influx of new religions into the United States over the last 50 years has made it increasingly difficult for traditionalists to call the country Judeo-Christian, and critics of Ten Commandments displays on state property say the state governments that sanction such displays are playing religious favorites with an increasingly diverse and pluralistic citizenship. The high court also will hear arguments in a similar case, McCreary County v. American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky. In both cases, the justices will consider whether the displays violate the establishment clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Supreme Court has not taken up the issue of public displays of the Ten Commandments since a 1980 ruling that overturned a Kentucky statute requiring public schools to hang the Ten Commandments in every classroom. In its brief, the Hindu American Foundation stressed that the religious makeup of the country has changed since 1980 – something it doesn’t feel Hudspeth understood when he ruled against Van Orden in 2002. The Hindu American Foundation’s brief was just one out of about 50 such documents filed in support of both sides in both Ten Commandments cases before the Supreme Court. It takes up the cause of some American Buddhists and Jainists who, along with some American Hindus, see the Ten Commandments as a Judeo-Christian set of rules that simply don’t pertain to them, especially in relationship with their civil government.

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