COMMENTARY

A proposed monument pairing

On this April Fool’s Day I find myself thinking of state Sen. Jason Rapert of Bigelow, God’s own legislator.

He has progressed well with a grandstanding bill providing that the state will erect a monument on the Capitol grounds listing the Ten Commandments as outlined in Exodus.

Those were the ones that Moses still had in his possession after he dropped and shattered a third tablet of five other commandments on his way down the mountain.

At least that’s according to Mel Brooks in a film—a documentary, I think it was—about the history of the world.

The only obstacles to Rapert’s and Moses’ and God’s monument—nothing but pesky gnats, really—have been those of a certain heathen inclination who like to quote Thomas Jefferson on a wall of separation between church and state.

These dreaded secular humanists contend that our government is not supposed to take any action that seems to establish religion. They talk incessantly about something they call a constitution, as if this constitution was as sacred as the words King James wrote himself as he tagged around with Moses and then Jesus, taking exhaustive notes as he went.

Though compromise was never tactically necessary for the bill’s enactment, I’d like to suggest for harmony’s sake—as a bone generously thrown in Christian charity to the pitiable heathens and secular humanists—a little companion measure.

It is that we also erect, adjacent to the monument containing the Ten Commandments, an identically sized and styled monument onto which would be carved mitigating secular context for those commandments that need it.

Here is what I mean:

To the commandment to have no other Gods before God, the adjacent monument would explain “except for the Razorback hog.”

To the commandment not to worship graven images, the adjacent monument would say “see preceding commandment and exception thereto, and wooo pig sooie.”

To the commandment not to take the name of the Lord in vain, the adjacent monument would say, “this means cussing, not craven political rhetoric to ‘take back this country for the Lord,’ as Brother Rapert declared that time in that speech on the Capitol steps over yonder.”

To the commandment to honor your father and mother, the adjacent monument would say “unless they have re-homed you.”

To the commandment not to kill, the adjacent monument would say “except for Osama bin Laden or Timothy McVeigh or persons living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki or persons convicted of capital murder with or without reasonable doubt— because, of course, not everything in Scripture is to be taken literally, though any condemnations of homosexual activity must be taken literally, because … just because.”

To the commandment not to commit adultery, the adjacent monument could say, “well, OK, but you shouldn’t get impeached over it.”

To the commandment not to bear false witness against thy neighbor, the adjacent monument could say, “go ahead and bear false witness against anybody not thy neighbor, especially if you’re running against him or her for political office.”

To the commandment not to covet your neighbor’s wife, the adjacent monument could say, “unless she refuses to move, in which case it’s on her.”

I’d call this Capitol lawn display “Commandments and Context—Guideposts and Mitigations for Morality and Freedom in America.”

I believe the proposal to be positively Solomonic and that people would come from miles around.

I believe the context monument might help us in any litigation that might arise in the federal judicial system.

We could stipulate that, should the courts force us to take down the commandment monument, then we’d take down the context monument too.

I bet we could sell the commandments to Alabama and the context to Massachusetts or Oregon.

John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

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