Richard Cohen, in his Washington Post editorial Supreme Zealotry, makes a couple of interesting points:

[The signers of the Declaration of Independence] asserted that "governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." That is a bold statement, but not religious in the least.

Scalia disagrees!

Scalia's candor is a wonderful thing. He is a devout Roman Catholic, and in 2002 he set out his philosophy in the journal First Things. He cited Saint Paul in Romans 13:1-5: "government . . . derives its moral authority from God."

Scalia's views are SO fundamentally different than those of the Founding Fathers that I wonder if he even knows the Founding Fathers' views.

Anyway...

Supreme Zealotry
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, March 8, 2005; Page A15

Justice Antonin Scalia, who believes in miracles, is one himself. Coming up on 20 years on the Supreme Court and many more in Washington, he nonetheless has retained the ability to write and speak in plain English. So it was no surprise that Scalia insisted last week that the Ten Commandments were not, as some argued, a mostly secular statement of only incidental religious meaning but rather a mostly religious statement of only incidental secular meaning. In the spirit of the Commandments, he told the truth.

That's not always the case. The standard lie about the display of the Ten Commandments is that they are not really religious. They are supposedly akin to the phrase "In God We Trust" on the coins of the realm or even the Ten Commandments at the high court itself, a rendering abridged so that the religious content is redacted. The rest, stuff about adultery and thievery and murder, is retained -- not that it has done much good.

There is a pattern to these cases. First someone gets the bright idea to put God back in the (fill in the blank) schoolhouse, courthouse, etc. A religious display is ginned up for the occasion. A lower authority intercedes, citing the Constitution and separation of church and state. After a good deal of back and forth, the religious display is either altered or secularized by proximity to other displays. So, if it is Christmas time, we get a crèche and a figure of Rudolph. This is supposed to transform the site, keeping it religious in the eye of the average beholder but secular to a court supposedly composed entirely of dummies. It was precisely the dummy that Scalia refused to play.

Scalia was, as usual, insisting on calling a spade a spade. "I mean, if you're watering it [the Ten Commandments] down to say that the only reason it's okay is it sends nothing but a secular message, I can't agree with you," he told a lawyer for the state of Texas. He then committed an additional act of candor that was more troubling than enlightening. Not only did he find the Ten Commandments to be religious, he asserted that they were "a symbol of the fact that government derives its authority from God." Oh yeah, Who says?