Ten Commandments appeal filed

By Gina Holland
Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court was urged yesterday to block the removal of a Ten Commandments monument from an Alabama court, part of an unusual legal strategy by the state's defiant top judge.

Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore has vowed to ignore a federal court order to move the 5,300-pound granite monument from the state judicial building. A federal judge ruled that the monument violates the Constitution's ban on government promotion of religion and must be removed by next week.

Moore's lawyers, in an extraordinary appeal at the high court, were challenging the judge's authority to tell state officials what to do.

Herbert Titus of Virginia Beach, Va., one of Moore's attorneys, stated in the appeal that the federal judge's decision "has threatened to invade the Alabama treasury for billions of dollars in an effort to cower its officials into prompt compliance with the court's final judgment and injunction, as well as to provide a significant incentive for state officials to initiate proceedings to remove Chief Justice Moore from office."

The ruling also "abridges the right of the people, through their elected representative (the chief justice), to acknowledge God as indispensable to the administration of justice," he wrote.

The paperwork was filed yesterday. It was unclear when it would be processed and reviewed by the justices, who are on break.

"I don't think the Supreme Court would touch this with a 10-foot pole," said Ayesha Khan, legal director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, one of the groups that sued after Moore moved the monument into the court building in the middle of the night in 2001.

The case brings yet another church-state controversy to the nation's high court. Justices had been asked to decide in their next session whether the Pledge of Allegiance should be barred from public schools because of the phrase "under God."

In 1980, the Supreme Court banned the Ten Commandments from classroom walls in public schools, but justices have not given a broad ruling on the constitutionality of indoor and outdoor government displays. The U.S. Supreme Court has a Ten Commandments depiction in its own courtroom.

In the Alabama case, a panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Moore, who has said that the Ten Commandments represent the moral foundation of American law.

Moore also plans to appeal that ruling, Titus said, and may request an emergency stay of the deadline to remove the monument.

Christopher Eisgruber, a law professor at Princeton University who clerked at the high court, predicted that Moore will have a tough time winning.

"The Supreme Court is never sympathetic to the idea that mandates of federal courts can be ignored," he said. "I think the justices will be bothered by this. Despite their political disagreements with one another, there's a lot of agreement on the court for the need for the rule of law."