Source: religionclause.blogspot.com
OKLAHOMA, USA, July 31, 2009: By a vote of 6 – 6 yesterday, the judges on the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals denied a rehearing in a Ten Commandments case.
The case in question was a June 8, 2009, decision called Green v. Haskell County Board of Commissioners, in which the court held that a display of a Ten Commandments monument on the lawn of the county courthouse in Stigler, Oklahoma, violated the Establishment Clause of the US Constitution (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” –US Const., Amend. 1). The court concluded that the particular history of this monument– including the religious motivation of its backers– meant that a reasonable observer would view the monument as having the impermissible primary effect of endorsing one particular religion.
Judge Gorsuch wrote in a dissent, “displays of the decalogue (the ten commandments) alongside other markers of our nation’s legal and cultural history do not threaten an establishment of religion.”