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Ten Commandments

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Larry Beinhart, author of Wag the Dog and The Librarian.

Once again, The Ten Commandments are going to court.

The last time a federal court ruled that they didn’t belong in our courthouses, a CNN poll showed that 77% of Americans disagreed. The ACLU sounds like it is taking a nit-picking stand against free speech on the technical grounds that it us a breach in a metaphoric wall. The pro-commandment people are making a much simpler and more emotional argument. One that sounds patriotic and in favor of the rights of people to speak their minds. They argue that the Ten Commandments is the foundation of the American legal system, indeed of our entire society, and why shouldn’t anybody be able to display them and everyone be able to read them.

But what they train you to do in law school is look at the facts first and only then determine what laws might apply. Judicial opinions begin with the facts. Let us begin by looking at the commandments and see what they actually are.

The Commandments begin: “Thou shalt have no other God before me.”

There it is, right up front. Commandment number one is to establish a religion. There could be other religions, clearly, but they could not be believed in more than this one. And, as an essential of religion is believing that your religion is the one, that makes your belief a sort of lesser belief.

This is very Islamic. Islam permits, even encourages, other monotheistic religions, but they are second class religions and the believers are second class citizens.

In some translations that is treated as a sort of preamble. That would leave nine commandments, so the tenth, against coveting, is split into two, separating neighbor’s wives out from all else that might be coveted. Also, the commandments sometimes come in different orders. But the substance is the same.

The second is, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain.”

This comes from a belief that the name of God cannot be spoken. This, for many years, led to the triviality of people saying, “gosh” for God and “gee whilikers” and such for Jesus Christ. If it means more than that, that you cannot speak out against God, or his priests, or his theology, than it is a serious infringement on free speech.

The third commandment is “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.”

In Islam they take this seriously and that’s why Islamic art has no depictions, only patterns and the words of God as dictated to Mohammed and recorded in the Koran. If we took it literally – and how else should we take it? – and seriously, we would have to strip our churches of the statues of Christ. We would have to smash the stained glass windows. On to the museums, tear up the painting. Out to our public squares to demolish the stone generals astride their stone horses. Into the courthouses to paint over the murals and take down the pictures of President Bush and replace them all with geometric patterns and the plaques of the Ten Commandments or other words of God.

Call that the Taliban commandment.

Commandment number four is “Remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy.”

This is the Wal-Mart amendment. I leave it to the retailers to defend the right to shop until you drop, twenty-four/seven.

As a parent I think that “Honor thy Father and Mother,” is an excellent idea. Should we overturn the law, just passed, that allows a child to sever relations with one parent who has murdered the other? Does a parent who brutalizes a child or rapes the child, deserve to honored by the child?

The commandments against killing, adultery, stealing and perjury are fairly straight-forward. They do not go against our fundamental legal beliefs, but they are hardly original and we don’t need to go to the bible to find out where they came from.

That takes us to the tenth and final commandment, “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor's.”

To covet is merely to think. It is one of our most sacred - and I use the word advisedly and deliberately – one of our most sacred legal principals that thought alone is not a crime. It is one of our most sacred principles that we are free to think any thought we want.

This is not even considering reality and the reality is that everyone covets. If not their neighbor’s spouse, then their BMW or their lawn or their job or their lifestyle. And that makes us, each and everyone, a commandment violator. Though, thank God, it does not make us criminals in the American justice system.

The American system is not based on the Ten Commandments. It is an explicit rejection of religious commandment systems.

We should permit the Ten Commandments to be posted. If, after reading them, a lawyer or judge thinks that the American legal system is rooted in them, he should have his right to practice law revoked.

And then, for the general public, whether they are on plaques or monuments, we should simply add, in big letters, “See how far we have come. We will not put our God before your God. Here we each worship as we like. We have paintings and statues, both sacred and secular. We are not the Taliban. We are free people. We are allowed to think any thought. We are allowed to speak those thoughts.”

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Larry Beinhart is the author of novels and screenplays and a book on how to write a mystery. His articles and essays have appeared in Newsday, the LA Times, the International Herald Tribune, Esquire and the Woodstock Times. He’s written and spoken on politics, on media and on writing.

He was a Fulbright Fellow and he’s lectured at Oxford and at the University of Tartu in Estonia. His awards include an Edgar, a Gold Dagger, a gold medal at the Virgin Islands Film Festival and two local Emmy Awards in Miami. He’s produced and directed commercials and industrials and worked as a political consultant.

He’s the co-host and one of the creators of In Your Face, a twice monthly political talk, music and comedy show, shot in Woodstock and distributed over the Dish Satellite Network by Free Speech TV.