Instapundit calls this story "another victory for anti-idiotarianism." I view it as extreme idiotarianism when people with serious jobs waste their time attacking another person's expression of his faith. This obsession with the Tend Commandments has become a wtich hunt. Recently the ACLU in Utah posted a request on its website asking its supporters to help it hunt down the last of 9 such monuments which had been donated by the Eagles 30 or 40 years ago. The first eight have been removed from public property, but just knowing that there's another out there is apparently annoying the heck out of them.

This resembles McCarthyism far more than protecting civil liberties. To me, civil liberties refers to things people are allowed to do, not what is prohibited. The idea that celebrating a historical statement of law which is sacred to three major world religions must be prevented smacks of oppression, not freedom. I could imagine these people defending the judge who wants the monument, on the basis of religious freedom and free speech, but the idea that civil liberties would be used to promote intolerance turns that concept on its head. It is said that such monuments constitute an an endorsement, and therefore an establishment, of religion, but that is a casuistic and quibbling argument. You have to look at the excesses of state churchs that were familiar to the framers to understand the meaning of the establishment clause. They were thinking of religious tests and oaths and the granting of state powers to ecclesiastical officials, such as the inquistion. They were seeking to establish and guarantee tolerance, not this kind of judicial rule by fiat. We are in far more danger today from judges attempting to purify the country from religious faith, that from any number of stone monuments. This is part and parcel of the fear that has come over our society, fear of using the wrong words, expressing the wrong opinion, of offending the wrong people, or exercising the wrong right. That is idiocy, not anti-idiotarianism, and it disappoints me that a person as intelligent and educated as Professor Reynolds seems to think it's a victory for the Bill of Rights. It smacks of a '60s-like view that government is the enemy and that anarchy is desirable, and a failure to realize that well-funded groups who have appointed themselves as the arbiters of our rights are more dangerous to those rights than anyone in government. There are ways to deal with excesses of government officials, but who will protect us from the ACLU?