On Friday, December 10th, the Council for Secular Humanism (CSH) filed an amicus curiae brief on behalf of Thomas Van Orden in Van Orden v. Rick Perry et al., which the U.S. Supreme Court will hear on appeal in February 2005.

In 2003, Thomas Van Orden filed a lawsuit to remove a display of the Ten Commandments that has stood on the grounds of the Texas State Capital since 1961. The Fifth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals ruled that the display could stay put.

"To claim that the Ten Commandments is not a religious expression is to avoid the logic of what it says," writes Eddie Tabash, the attorney filing the brief. "To place it on public property, on government property that constitutes the locus of a state's government, is for that state to communicate outsider status to religious dissenters and atheists." Therefore, the Supreme Court must either call for the removal of the monument or "address exactly what, if any, are the rights that believers have in this country that nonbelievers don't have."

Tabash also filed an amicus brief in Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow earlier this year, another recent case dealing with church-state separation. Many people had hoped that the Supreme Court would address the issue last year, when it agreed to hear the Newdow case. But that case, which addressed the inclusion of the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, was rejected on a technicality.

This season marks the first time in twenty-five years that the Supreme Court is addressing the tricky issue of church-state separation, by agreeing to hear cases regarding displays of the Ten Commandments located on public property in Texas and Kentucky. Though the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment forbids government endorsement of any faith, vestiges of religious ritual remain in many legal government proceedings and on some government buildings.

The brief argues that while many of America's founders were religious individuals, they recognized the dangers of entangling religion and government, and therefore tried to separate the two. It also points out that in 1993, the monument was moved to its current location - "between the buildings that house the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the government of the State of Texas" - specifically to "reflect the role of the Commandments in the making of law."

David Koepsell, the Council's Executive Director, hopes that the Supreme Court will resolve this thorny issue once and for all.

"The Supreme Court faces one of its greatest moments of honesty, and must choose whether this nation will digress from the secular path established by our founders and upheld through the centuries of legal precedent or whether it will redefine the United States as a Judeo-Christian nation, to the exclusion of the beliefs and non-belief of many of its own citizens," Koepsell says. "We hope that the Court will choose the former, and keep religion and the state in their two separate spheres."

The Council for Secular Humanism is a 501(c)(3) non-profit educational organization promoting rational inquiry, secular values and positive human development through the advancement of secular humanism. The Council, publisher of the bimonthly journal Free Inquiry, has a Web site at www.secularhumanism.org.